Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Latif from Radiolab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that? Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcasts.
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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Chapter 2: What foundational ideas about freedom were excluded from the Constitution?
It declares that white slave patrols are to...
arrest any slave or slaves, whether with or without a permit, who may be caught in the woods or forest with any fire or torch, which slave or slaves thus arrested shall be subjected to corporal punishment not exceeding 30 stripes. So you can hear in that early legislation, part of the concern is an uprising, is arson, is the fear that slaves will burn things down. And
the responsibility not of what we would later expect due process or what white property owners were entitled to in the Bill of Rights, but in fact, immediate corporal punishment. Punishments were swift, indiscriminate, and harsh. Solomon Northrup, whose story was told in the film 12 Years a Slave, lived as a free person in New York State before being abducted and sold into slavery in the South.
He writes in his memoir this about slave patrols. He says, Each company has a certain distance to ride up and down the bayou. He then says that one slave had fled before one of these companies, thinking he could reach his cabin before they could overtake him. But one of their dogs, a great ravenous hound, gripped him by the leg and held him fast. The patrollers whipped him severely.
That's pretty horrifying. And as you're describing this sort of slave patrol system, it just what's so striking about it is that it was it seems to have really effectively mobilized, as you said, not just land owning, you know, whites who own slaves, but people who didn't themselves own slaves. It gave them both the men and presumably also, you know, slaves.
the women in these societies, the white women in these societies, like a sense of superiority almost over this whole class of people that they were now in charge of patrolling.
Absolutely, yes. So the fact of chattel slavery, by the time of the founding of the United States— had already for 200 years served as a form of social insurance against the insurrection and dissent and potential political rebellion of the majority of landless white men who didn't have slaves and lived precarious lives.
So that they would serve in this capacity alongside major plantation owners was a kind of way to build community around the notion of protecting the white community from the enslaved black population.
The slave patrols would continue predominantly in southern states for over 150 years, up until the end of the Civil War, when the Confederacy surrendered and ended its rebellion in 1865. While slavery was abolished with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that same year, it didn't mean the violent surveillance of newly freed Black citizens would end.
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