The lasting legacy of the slave patrols
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Hey, it's Rand. Before we get started, we want to give you a heads up that this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence and racism. This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States of America that began 250 years ago this year. And today, we're bringing you the story of how those words — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — weren't exactly intended for everybody.
The United States was born as one of the most inegalitarian societies in the world.
The Constitution was written by and for a very specific set of people — landowning white men. Everybody else — women, Native Americans already living in what would become the United States, and Black Americans, whether free or enslaved — were not a part of that vision. And even though founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson, who, let's be real, owned enslaved Black people himself, fought to eliminate slavery in the Constitution, they failed. Slavery was just too divisive and too lucrative, a foundation of the colonial economy. And according to Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of African American Studies and Public Affairs at Princeton University and author of The Condemnation of Blackness, Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, white supremacy was built into the nation's psyche long before the Declaration of Independence.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the way slave patrols functioned is that they were explicit in their design to empower the entire white population, not just with police power, but with the duty to police the comings and goings and movements of Black people.
This is the story of how the creation of white-led slave patrols to control the comings and goings of enslaved Black people laid the groundwork for America's racial hierarchies in ways that we continue to grapple with today. That's coming up after a quick break.
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Slave patrols, groups of white men empowered to control and monitor Black people, were first formed in South Carolina in the early 1700s. The premise was simple. Police enslaved Black people to make sure they didn't plan uprisings or otherwise threaten the slave-dependent colonial economy. Slave patrols quickly spread across many of the colonies, enforcing what were called slave codes, laws controlling almost every aspect of enslaved people's lives. By law, almost all white men had to serve on these patrols, making them a central part of colonial life.
Essentially, men between the ages of 21 and 45 were targeted. They could be at every level of society, particularly in the South, from large slave-holding plantation owners to men who were of the middling sort, farmers without enslaved populations, brick masons, other kinds. They generally served for a period of time up to a year. This was all hands on deck. Everybody was meant to contribute. The members who were formal in the slave patrol were paid 25 cents an hour in some cases and were fined if people shirked their duty. If they chose not to show up for duty, they could be fined anywhere from $5 to $10 in some of the slave colonies.
Their duties were written into law, and they continued to be the law of the land well after the establishment of the United States of America.
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