Productive Black Unity✦Citizenship by oath, never sold✦Each one teach one✦Black-centered · Minority-focused · International✦Scattered by design · We gather by design✦Productive Black Unity✦Citizenship by oath, never sold✦Each one teach one✦Black-centered · Minority-focused · International✦Scattered by design · We gather by design✦
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Why We Were Scattered

How Black unity was broken, and how the United Black Network State rebuilds it.

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Why We Were Scattered

A history of how Black unity was broken, and how the United Black Network State rebuilds it

The Charge

We did not lose our unity. It was taken from us. It was taken by law and by fire, by the auction block and the courtroom, by the banker's pen and the bulldozer's blade. And every time we gathered the pieces and began to build again, the hand that scattered us returned.

This is not a complaint. This is a record. And a people who know their record can stop it from repeating.

I. Severed at the Root

Before the chains, there was Africa. Every human being alive today descends from people who first walked the earth on African soil, and the oldest known remains of our species, some three hundred thousand years old, were found in Morocco.1 Beginning some sixty thousand years ago, our ancestors carried humanity out of Africa into Asia, Europe and Australia, and across a land bridge that once joined Siberia to Alaska into the Americas.2 When the ice retreated, people in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East learned to farm, some eleven thousand years ago,3 and in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the cities of Sumer invented writing by about 3200 BCE.4 On the Nile, at nearly the same time, Egypt was united under its kings,5 and from Kush to the south came pharaohs who would rule Egypt itself.6 The story of human civilization is one story, and it begins with us.

Africa kept building. Aksum minted its own coins and traded with Rome and India.7 In the west, Ghana, then Mali, then Songhay grew rich on the trade in gold and salt. Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali, crossed the Sahara to Mecca in 1324 with such wealth that it was recorded for centuries afterward,8 and in Timbuktu scholars gathered libraries of manuscripts in law, astronomy and medicine.9 Great Zimbabwe raised its walls of stone without mortar.10 Then, in the fifteenth century, ships came down the coast of West Africa from Portugal, and in 1444 a large cargo of captive Africans was sold on the docks of Lagos, in Portugal.11 Spain, the Netherlands, Britain and France followed. For four centuries the trade ran on European demand, and it was fed by African rulers and merchants who sold captives taken in war.12 In 1619 the first Africans in English Virginia arrived. They had been taken from Angola aboard a Portuguese slave ship and seized at sea by English privateers.13 We were not a people without history. We were taken from the very birthplace of it.

They brought us here from many nations. We were Akan and Igbo, Wolof and Kongo, Mande and Yoruba, each people with its own tongue, its own faith and its own name for home.14 Many slaveholders preferred to mix captives of different origins, so that no shared language could carry a plan of escape or revolt.15

What the ship began, the law finished. When the enslaved rose at Stono in 1739, South Carolina answered the next year with a statute that silenced the drum and the horn, because those instruments could "call together or give sign or notice to one another." The same statute made it a crime to teach an enslaved person to write.16 In 1834 South Carolina made it a crime to teach us to read.17 North Carolina and Virginia had already shut the schoolhouse door in 1830 and 1831.18

And then they sold the family. Between 1790 and 1860 about a million of our people were driven from the Upper South into the cotton country, most of them through the slave trade.19 By one careful estimate, that trade alone ended one in five marriages in the selling states and took one in three children from their parents.20 For decades after freedom, our people placed notices in the newspapers, searching for the mothers, husbands and children who had been sold away.21

Consider what was done. They took the language. They took the drum. They took the book. They took the child from the mother. A people without memory, without language and without one another can be held. That was the design.

What survived, survived in fragments: in song, in faith, in food, in the way we greet one another. From those fragments we built a culture the whole world imitates. But the structure that holds a people together, shared institutions and a shared record, was cut at the root.

II. Every Time We Built, It Was Taken

Freedom came, and we built at once. We did not wait. We did not beg. We built.

The bank. On March 3, 1865, Congress chartered the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company to keep the savings of the newly free.22 Our people trusted it with their wages and their hopes. In 1870 Congress loosened its rules, and the men who ran it speculated and mismanaged until it failed on June 29, 1874. More than sixty-one thousand depositors were left holding nearly three million dollars in losses.23 Years later, those who could file claims recovered about sixty-two cents on the dollar, and many recovered nothing at all.24 A generation learned that its savings were not safe.

The land. Out of slavery, with no forty acres given, we bought land with our own sweat. By 1910 Black farmers in the South owned more than fifteen and a half million acres.25 Then the land began to slip away. It went through fraud and violence. It went through discrimination in the very federal farm programs meant to help, a wrong the government itself was made to answer for in Pigford v. Glickman.26 And it went through the quiet trap of heirs' property: land passed down without a will, which a single co-owner, or a speculator who bought a sliver of it, could force to auction.27 By the end of the century, the land held by Black farm operators had fallen to about two million acres.28 They did not always need a torch. Often they used paperwork.

The towns. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, stood Greenwood, a Black district so prosperous it was known as Black Wall Street.29 On May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob, some of its members deputized by the police and joined by units of the National Guard, burned it to the ground. About thirty-five blocks were destroyed, along with 1,256 homes and the churches, schools, businesses, hospital and library of an entire community.30 The official count of the dead was thirty-six. The State of Oklahoma's own commission later estimated that between one hundred and three hundred people were killed.31 Not one of those crimes, the commission found, "was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level."32 The insurers refused the claims, and every lawsuit failed.33

Tulsa did not stand alone. In 1919, the Red Summer, white mobs attacked Black communities in dozens of cities.34 That fall in Elaine, Arkansas, Black sharecroppers who dared to organize a union were hunted by posses and soldiers. More than a hundred may have died, and twelve Black men were sentenced to death in trials held in the shadow of a mob, until the Supreme Court ruled in Moore v. Dempsey that a trial dominated by a mob is no trial at all.35 In 1923 the Black town of Rosewood, Florida, was burned off the map. Seventy-one years later, Florida paid its survivors.36

The vote. The Fifteenth Amendment promised us the ballot in 1870, and the South took it back. Poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries and open terror stripped Black men from the voting rolls across the region by the turn of the century.37 By 1964, fewer than one in ten Black adults of voting age in Mississippi were registered to vote.38 It took the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the blood spilled on the bridge at Selma to win back what the Constitution had already promised.39

The rope. Between 1877 and 1950, white mobs lynched more than four thousand Black people in the South, often before crowds, and the killers were almost never punished.40 Nearly two hundred anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, and the Senate let every one of them die; in 2005 it formally apologized.41 Lynching did not become a federal hate crime until 2022.42

The neighborhoods. In the 1930s, federal appraisers graded the neighborhoods of some two hundred American cities, and they shaded ours in red.43 The Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934, warned its appraisers against "inharmonious racial groups." It largely refused to insure home loans in Black neighborhoods, while it financed the white suburbs that built the American middle class.44 Then came the highways. Interstate 10 was driven down North Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans, through the oaks where our people gathered for generations.45 Interstate 94 was driven through Rondo, the heart of Black St. Paul, displacing some six to seven hundred families and about three hundred businesses.46

Each time, what we built in one place was destroyed in that place. And because it was in one place, it could be.

III. The Leaders Were Watched

From 1956 to 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ran a secret program called COINTELPRO against Americans it considered threats.47 In August 1967 it opened a campaign against Black organizations.48 On March 4, 1968, it put its goals in writing. The first was to prevent the "coalition" of Black organizations. The second was to prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could "unify, and electrify," the movement. It named Martin Luther King Jr. as one such man.49

Read that again. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was not afraid of our anger. It was afraid of our unity. It was afraid of a man who could bring us together.

The Bureau's campaign to discredit Dr. King is written into the record of the United States Senate.50 Malcolm X was shot down on February 21, 1965. Government informants surrounded him to the end. His own bodyguard that day was an undercover officer of the New York police, and the FBI kept informants inside his circle.51 For fifty-six years, the FBI and the police kept back evidence that would have cleared two of the men convicted of his murder. In 2021, a New York court threw out both convictions.52 The record was not lost. It was hidden. Dr. King was shot down on April 4, 1968.53 Fred Hampton, twenty-one years old, was killed in his bed before dawn on December 4, 1969. The raid was carried out by Chicago police working for the county prosecutor, and they were guided by a floor plan of his apartment supplied by an FBI informant.54 A federal appeals court found the evidence of conspiracy strong enough for a jury, and in 1982 the government paid $1.85 million to settle.55

They were never afraid of one of us. They were afraid of all of us together.

IV. They Used Our Bodies

Even our bodies were not our own. In Alabama in the 1840s, the physician later honored as the father of American gynecology perfected his surgery on enslaved women, Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy among them, cutting them again and again without anesthesia.56

In 1932 the United States Public Health Service began a study of six hundred Black men in Macon County, Alabama. Three hundred ninety-nine of them had syphilis. They were told they were being treated for "bad blood." They were not treated. When penicillin became the standard cure in the 1940s, the government kept it from them, and it let the study run for forty years, until a reporter exposed it in 1972.57 The government's own review panel found the study "ethically unjustified."58 Men died who did not have to die. Wives were infected. Children were born with the disease. In 1997 the President of the United States stood before the survivors and apologized.59

They reached even into the womb. In 1961 Fannie Lou Hamer entered a Mississippi hospital to have a small tumor removed and was sterilized without her knowledge or consent. She called it a "Mississippi appendectomy," because it was done to so many Black women in the South.60 In 1973, in Montgomery, Alabama, a federally funded clinic sterilized two Black sisters, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, fourteen and twelve years old. A federal court found that poor people had been coerced into sterilization under the threat of losing their welfare benefits.61 In North Carolina, the state Eugenics Board ordered some 7,600 sterilizations between 1929 and 1974, and by the 1960s the knife fell most heavily on Black women.62

A people who cannot trust the doctor, the hospital or the government that runs them will not seek the care they need. That distrust was not born of rumor. It was earned.

V. Then Came the Long Drain

Then came the war on drugs, and it fell hardest on us. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 punished one gram of crack cocaine as harshly as one hundred grams of powder.63 In 1995 the government's own Sentencing Commission urged Congress to change it, and Congress refused.64 About eighty-five percent of those convicted of federal crack offenses were Black.65 It took until 2010 for that ratio to be reduced, and even then it was not erased.66

In 1972 this nation held 161 of every hundred thousand people behind bars. By 2012 it held 707, more than two million human beings.67 Homes lost their earners. Children lost their parents. Neighborhoods lost the men who held them together. And a record followed each one for life, closing the doors to work, to housing and to the ballot.68

VI. Not Only Here

What was done to us here was done to our people across the earth.

Some twelve and a half million Africans were forced aboard slave ships bound for the Americas, and nearly two million of them did not survive the crossing.69 In the Congo, under the personal rule of King Leopold II of Belgium, Africans who failed to meet the rubber quotas were whipped, taken hostage and mutilated, as a British consul reported to Parliament in 1904, and millions died.70 In German South West Africa, now Namibia, a German general ordered the destruction of the Herero people in 1904. Most of the Herero and about half of the Nama perished, and in 2021 Germany acknowledged it as genocide.71 When Haiti, the first free Black republic in the world, won its independence, France demanded 150 million francs in 1825 as the price of recognition, and Haiti paid on that debt for generations.72 In Kenya in the 1950s, the British detained tens of thousands without trial, and in 2013 the British government stated before Parliament that Kenyans "were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration."73 In South Africa, apartheid ruled from 1948 to 1994, a system the nations of the world declared a crime against humanity.74 And in Rwanda in 1994, some 800,000 people were slaughtered in one hundred days, while the world, warned in advance, looked away.75

Different nations. Different centuries. The same lesson. A people divided and unprotected is a people at the mercy of others.

VII. What Was Left Was Scattered Help

Through all of it, we never stopped helping one another. The church fed us. The barbershop counseled us. The sorority and the fraternity lifted us. A leader rose, a concert raised money, a fund was started for a family in need.

But the help came in pieces: a church here, a business there, a leader rising and falling alone, entertainers coming together for a cause and then going their separate ways. Because it was scattered, it was never predictable. Because it was never predictable, no one could build on it. Help that cannot be counted on cannot be planned around, and a people cannot rise on help that comes once.

VIII. The Answer

The lesson of our history is plain. Everything we built in one place was destroyed in that place. Every leader who stood alone was struck down alone.

So we will build differently.

And for the first time in our history, we have the tools to do it. What our ancestors could hold together only by hand, by word of mouth and by the courage of a few, we can now hold together by design. Artificial intelligence can plan with us, organize us and carry out the work of a thousand clerks, so that our people spend their hours building, earning and learning, not filling out forms. Encrypted networks let us speak to one another across every city, privately and at once, with no single line for anyone to cut. Open, tamper-proof ledgers keep our records and our treasury in plain sight, where every citizen can check them and no one can quietly erase them. Digital tools let one organizer do the work of a whole office, let one teacher reach a whole nation, and open new ways for our people to earn. With these tools, help that once came in pieces can come every time.

We build a network, not a single place: chapters in every city, joined as one, with a capital that lives online, where no mob can burn it and no wall can divide it.

We build a record that cannot be erased: a ledger of our people, our property and our progress, sealed so that no one can rewrite it.

We build help that is predictable: services our people can count on, every time, not once.

And we build a unity that does not depend on one leader: a people bound by one oath and one commandment, Productive Black Unity, so that no single loss can ever scatter us again.

This is the United Black Network State. Our ancestors were scattered by design. We gather by design.

Each one teach one.

Notes

  1. Jean-Jacques Hublin et al., "New Fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the Pan-African Origin of Homo sapiens," Nature 546 (2017): 289–92.
  2. Rasmus Nielsen et al., "Tracing the Peopling of the World through Genomics," Nature 541 (2017): 302–10.
  3. Melinda A. Zeder, "The Origins of Agriculture in the Near East," Current Anthropology 52, no. S4 (2011): S221–35.
  4. Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000–323 BC, 3rd ed. (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).
  5. Ian Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  6. László Török, The Kingdom of Kush: Handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Shaw, Oxford History of Ancient Egypt.
  7. Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991).
  8. Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London: Methuen, 1973); John O. Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (Leiden: Brill, 1999); N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), for the account of al-'Umari.
  9. Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, eds., The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008).
  10. Innocent Pikirayi, The Zimbabwe Culture: Origins and Decline of Southern Zambezian States (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2001).
  11. A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Gomes Eanes de Zurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, trans. C. R. Beazley and E. Prestage (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896–99).
  12. Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
  13. Engel Sluiter, "New Light on the '20. and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia, August 1619," William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 2 (1997): 395–98; John Thornton, "The African Experience of the '20. and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia in 1619," William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1998): 421–34.
  14. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
  15. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, on the extent of this practice, which historians still debate.
  16. "An Act for the better ordering and governing Negroes and other Slaves in this Province," No. 670 (1740), §§ 36, 45, in The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, ed. David J. McCord, vol. 7 (Columbia, SC: A. S. Johnston, 1840), 410, 413; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).
  17. Act No. 2639 (1834), § 1, in McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 7:468.
  18. Acts Passed by the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, at the Session of 1830–31 (Raleigh: Lawrence & Lemay, 1831), ch. 6; Acts Passed at a General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia [1830–31] (Richmond: Thomas Ritchie, 1831), ch. 39, §§ 4–6, pp. 107–8; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).
  19. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Michael Tadman, "Slave Trading in the Ante-Bellum South: An Estimate of the Extent of the Inter-Regional Slave Trade," Journal of American Studies 13, no. 2 (1979): 195–220. For a lower estimate of the trade's share, see Jonathan B. Pritchett, "Quantitative Estimates of the United States Interregional Slave Trade, 1820–1860," Journal of Economic History 61, no. 2 (2001).
  20. Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, estimates of family separation.
  21. Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
  22. An Act to incorporate the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, ch. 92, 13 Stat. 510 (1865).
  23. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, "OCC Highlights Freedman's Savings and Trust Company," News Release 2020-24 (March 2020); Carl R. Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedman's Savings Bank (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).
  24. Reginald Washington, "The Freedman's Savings and Trust Company and African American Genealogical Research," Prologue 29, no. 2 (Summer 1997), National Archives and Records Administration; Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), ch. 1.
  25. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population 1790–1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), 574.
  26. Pigford v. Glickman, 185 F.R.D. 82 (D.D.C. 1999); Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
  27. Thomas W. Mitchell, "From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common," Northwestern University Law Review 95, no. 2 (2001): 505–80.
  28. Jess Gilbert, Gwen Sharp, and M. Sindy Felin, "The Loss and Persistence of Black-Owned Farms and Farmland: A Review of the Research Literature and Its Implications," Southern Rural Sociology 18, no. 2 (2002): 1–30; U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1999 Agricultural Economics and Land Ownership Survey, 1997 Census of Agriculture, vol. 3, pt. 4 (Washington, DC, 2001).
  29. Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
  30. Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Oklahoma City, 2001), iv, 12–13; U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Review and Evaluation: Tulsa Race Massacre (Washington, DC, January 10, 2025), 1–4.
  31. Oklahoma Commission, Tulsa Race Riot, 12–13, 123–24.
  32. Oklahoma Commission, Tulsa Race Riot, 12–13.
  33. Alfred L. Brophy, "Assessing State and City Culpability," in Oklahoma Commission, Tulsa Race Riot, 166–67; Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
  34. David F. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011).
  35. Grif Stockley, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001); Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86 (1923).
  36. Maxine D. Jones et al., A Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida, in January 1923, submitted to the Florida Board of Regents, December 22, 1993; ch. 94-359, Laws of Florida (1994).
  37. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
  38. South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 313 (1966).
  39. U.S. Const. amend. XXIV (1964); Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-110, 79 Stat. 437; David J. Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
  40. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed. (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
  41. S. Res. 39, 109th Cong. (2005).
  42. Emmett Till Antilynching Act, Pub. L. No. 117-107, 136 Stat. 1125 (2022).
  43. Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, et al., "Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America," in American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers (Richmond, VA: Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond); Amy E. Hillier, "Redlining and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation," Journal of Urban History 29, no. 4 (2003): 394–420.
  44. National Housing Act, Pub. L. No. 73-479, 48 Stat. 1246 (1934); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), ch. 11; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), ch. 4.
  45. Raymond A. Mohl, "The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt" (Washington, DC: Poverty & Race Research Action Council, 2002), 22–23.
  46. David Vassar Taylor, African Americans in Minnesota (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002); Raymond A. Mohl, "Planned Destruction: The Interstates and Central City Housing," in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes, ed. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 226–45.
  47. U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, S. Rep. No. 94-755 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), 3.
  48. Senate Select Committee, Book III, 4.
  49. Senate Select Committee, Book III, 22–23.
  50. Senate Select Committee, Book III, "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Case Study," 79–184.
  51. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), chs. 14–16 and epilogue.
  52. People v. Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County, order vacating convictions, November 18, 2021, on the joint motion of the New York County District Attorney and defense counsel, with the District Attorney's affirmation in support setting out the evidence withheld by the FBI and the New York Police Department.
  53. U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on Assassinations, Final Report, H.R. Rep. No. 95-1828 (1979).
  54. Senate Select Committee, Book III, 223–24; Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010).
  55. Hampton v. Hanrahan, 600 F.2d 600 (7th Cir. 1979), rev'd in part on other grounds, 446 U.S. 754 (1980); Haas, Assassination of Fred Hampton.
  56. Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017); Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006).
  57. James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, new and expanded ed. (New York: Free Press, 1993); Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
  58. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Ad Hoc Advisory Panel (Washington, DC: Public Health Service, April 28, 1973).
  59. William J. Clinton, "Remarks in Apology to African-Americans on the Quality of Human Research," May 16, 1997, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1997, bk. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1998).
  60. Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).
  61. Relf v. Weinberger, 372 F. Supp. 1196, 1199 (D.D.C. 1974); Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
  62. Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); North Carolina Department of Administration, Governor's Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolina's Eugenics Board, Final Report to the Governor (Raleigh, 2012).
  63. Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, Pub. L. No. 99-570, § 1002, 100 Stat. 3207 (codified at 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)).
  64. U.S. Sentencing Commission, Special Report to the Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy (Washington, DC, 1995); Pub. L. No. 104-38, 109 Stat. 334 (1995).
  65. Kimbrough v. United States, 552 U.S. 85, 98 (2007).
  66. Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, Pub. L. No. 111-220, 124 Stat. 2372; First Step Act of 2018, Pub. L. No. 115-391, § 404, 132 Stat. 5194, 5222.
  67. National Research Council, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, ed. Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2014), 13.
  68. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).
  69. Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, SlaveVoyages (Emory University), https://www.slavevoyages.org.
  70. Roger Casement, "Correspondence and Report from His Majesty's Consul at Boma Respecting the Administration of the Independent State of the Congo," Parliamentary Papers, Cd. 1933 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1904); Jan Vansina, Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  71. Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, eds., Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 in Namibia and Its Aftermath (Monmouth, UK: Merlin Press, 2008); German Federal Foreign Office, statement by Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on the conclusion of negotiations with Namibia, May 28, 2021.
  72. Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).
  73. Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); William Hague, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, statement on the settlement of the Mau Mau claims, House of Commons, Hansard, June 6, 2013.
  74. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, art. I, November 30, 1973, 1015 U.N.T.S. 243; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 7 vols. (Cape Town, 1998–2003).
  75. United Nations, Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, U.N. Doc. S/1999/1257 (December 15, 1999); Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999).