African American History Resources- HI 211: Slavery in the US: History and Effects

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• Overlooked No More: William B. Gould, Escaped Slave and Civil War Diarist by Clay Risen in The New York Times (2022) 

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• Home of the Slave: "The Birth of a Nation" and the Persistence of Slavery by Bernard Beck in Multicultural Perspectives (2017). 
  • "Different subgroups in society have diverse motives for remembering or forgetting important events in history. In American history, slavery has had a deep and enduring bad effect on everything that came afterward. There have been attempts to forget or remember this chapter in the national narrative related to the intentions of subcultural groups in the present. The treatment of slavery in American movies has been a powerful factor in these attempts. Recent movies have returned to a focus on slavery at the same time that national opinion has turned away from African American issues and sympathies. The recent movie "The Birth of a Nation" exemplifies the new emphasis on slavery in the movies and the lack of concern for it in public discourse."
• How long are the chains of slavery in the United States? Estimates of the intergenerational effects for black males between 1880-1930 by Gregory N. Price in Social & Economic Studies (2019). 
  • "While chattel slavery in the United States ended in 1865, racial inequality between the descendants of slaves and other racial groups, particularly whites, persists. While explanations for the causes of this inequality are many, the extent to which it is a consequence of slavery itself is an empirical question that is relatively underexplored. In this paper, with linked data on males and their fathers in the 1880-1930 US Census, I consider the extent to which slavery conditioned the economic mobility and status of males who had fathers born as slaves approximately 65 years after the emancipation of Slaves. My parameter estimates of the elasticity of son’s economic mobility and status with respect to their father’s slave status suggests that through 1930, being a black male descendant of a black male slave father mattered and was associated with lower economic mobility and status. I also estimate the decay rate associated with the intergenerational effect of slavery, and find that the chains of slavery are quite long in that as of 1930, it would take as long as 175 years, approximately, for the effects of slavery to disappear entirely. The implied counterfactuals of my estimates provide a context and basis for reparations, as they suggest that in the absence of slavery, the economic mobility and status of male slave descendants would have been higher. The reduction in economic status/mobility as a result of being a descendant of a male slave can be viewed as the “reparable” intergenerational harm of chattel slavery in the US."