13th

So let's look at the statistics.

The United States is home

to 5% of the world's population...

but 25% of the world's prisoners.

Think about that.

A little country with 5%

of the world's population

having 25% of the world's prisoners?

One out of four?

One out of four human beings

with their hands on bars, shackled,

in the world are locked up here,

in the land of the free.

We had a prison population of 300,000

in 1972.

Today, we have a prison population

of 2.3 million.

The United States now has the highest rate

of incarceration in the world.

So, you see, now suddenly

they're in an awakening that,

"Oh, perhaps we need to downsize

our prison system.

It's gotten too expensive.

It's gotten out of hand."

Um, but the very folks

who often express so much concern,

uh, about the cost

and the expanse of the system

are often very unwilling

to talk in any serious way

about remedying the harm

that has been done.

History is not just

stuff that happens by accident.

We are the products of the history

that our ancestors chose, if we're white.

If we are black, we are products

of the history that our ancestors

most likely did not choose.

Yet here we all are together,

the products of that set of choices.

And we have to understand that

in order to escape from it.

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution

makes it unconstitutional

for someone to be held as a slave.

In other words, it grants freedom...

to all Americans.

There are exceptions, including criminals.

There's a clause, a loophole.

If you have that

in the structure,

in this constitutional language,

then it's there to be used as a tool

for whichever purposes

one wants to use it.

One of the things

to bear in mind is that

when we think about slavery,

it was an economic system.

And the demise of slavery

at the end of the Civil War

left the Southern economy in tatters.

Uh, and so this presented a big question.

There are four million people

who were formerly property,

and they were formerly

kind of the integral part

of the economic production system

in the South.

And now those people are free.

And so what do you do with these people?

How do you rebuild your economy?

The 13th Amendment loophole

was immediately exploited.

After the Civil War,

African Americans were arrested en masse.

It was our nation's first prison boom.

You were basically a slave again.

The 13th Amendment says that

"Except for criminals,

everybody else is free."

Well, now if you're criminalized,

that doesn't apply to you.

They were arrested

for extremely minor crimes,

like loitering or vagrancy.

And they had to provide labor

to rebuild the economy

of the South after the Civil War.

What you got after that

was a rapid transition

to a kind of mythology

of black criminality.

Go back and, you know, read the rhetoric

that people used then.

They would say that the Negro

was out of control,

that there's a threat of violence

to white women.

So the same sort of image

that we had of Uncle Remus

and these genial, kind of, black figures

was replaced by this rapacious,

uh, menacing, Negro male evil

that had to be banished.

Birth of a Nation was

just a profoundly important

cultural event.

It's the first major blockbuster film,

hailed for both its artistic achievement

and for its political commentary.

And when it was released,

it had this rapturous response.

You know, there were lines everywhere

that it was being shown.

Birth of a Nation confirmed the story

that many whites wanted to tell

about the Civil War and its aftermath.

To erase defeat and to take out of it

sort of a martyrdom.

Woodrow Wilson, the sitting president,

had a private screening

of it in the White House. He calls it,

"History written with lightning."

And every image you see of a black person

is a demeaned, animal-like image.

Cannibalistic, animalistic.

The image of the African American male.

There's a famous scene

where a woman throws herself off a cliff

rather than be raped

by a black male criminal.

In the film, you see black people

being a threat to white women.

All the myths of black men as rapists

was ultimately stemmed by the reality

that the white political elite

and the business establishment

needed black bodies working.

What we overlook

about Birth of a Nation

is that it was also

a tremendously accurate prediction

of the way in which race

would operate in the United States.

Birth of a Nation

was almost directly responsible

for the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.

It had received this romantic,

glowing, heroic portrait.

The Klan never had the ritual

of burning the cross.

That was something

that D.W. Griffith came up with

because he thought

that it was a great cinematic image.

So it was literally

an instance of life imitating art.

The ripples emanate far out

from just the simple fact

that it's a movie

in the early motion picture age.

With the tremendous

burst of popularity

that the Ku Klux Klan

had as a result of Birth of a Nation

came another wave of terrorism.

We had lynchings

between Reconstruction and World War II.

Thousands of African Americans

murdered by mobs

under the idea

that they had done something criminal.

At the National Democratic

Convention in New York in 1924,

it is estimated that at least

350 delegates were Klansmen.

The demographic geography

of this country was shaped by that era.

Now we have African Americans

in Los Angeles,

in Oakland, and Chicago, and Cleveland,

Detroit, Boston, New York.

And very few people appreciate that

the African Americans in those communities

did not go there as immigrants

looking for new economic opportunities.

They went there as refugees from terror.

We didn't just land in Oakland,

in LA, in Compton,

in Harlem, in Brownsville in 2015.

This is generational...

generational trauma.

The letters "KKK"

were carved with a penknife

on the chest and stomach

of this man in Houston, Texas,

after he had been hanged by his knees

from an oak tree and flogged with a chain.

The Chicago Negro boy,

Emmett Till, is alleged

to have paid unwelcome attention

to Roy Bryant's most attractive wife.

And then

when it became unacceptable

to engage in that kind of open terrorism,

then it shifted to something more legal.

Segregation. Jim Crow.

Laws were passed

that relegated African Americans

to a permanent second-class status.

These things really begin to live out

the prophecy that Griffith was making

about the way that race operates.

And this fear of crime

is central to all of this.

Every time you saw a sign

that said "white and colored,"

every time you had to deal

with the indignation

of being told you can't go

through the front door.

Every day you weren't allowed to vote,

weren't allowed to go to school,

you were bearing a burden

that was injurious.

Civil rights activists

began to see the necessity

of building not just

a civil rights movement,

but a human rights movement.

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