Consult a historian

In another part of the forest –

A couple of things. One, picking cotton is not a synonym for slavery. Sharecroppers picked cotton; laborers picked cotton. Warnock wasn’t saying his mother was a slave, he was saying she was poor, and had to do hard painful (the bolls tear up your hands) work to make a meager living.

Two, no, slavery did not end in America 157 years ago. Slavery was reinstated in the South (without being called that) after Reconstruction was terminated. Jim Crow laws were passed that made it a crime for black people to be unemployed, along with a bunch of other trivialities that didn’t apply to white people. Guess what the sentence was! Picking cotton! Or harvesting turpentine in the pine forests, which was also miserable lethal work. Cotton growers “leased” prisoners, and if the prisoners died of overwork and starvation and filth, there were always plenty more.

Three, what kind of miserable spiteful reactionary shit is that?

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