A short review by Toni Morrison

I'm now deep into The Underground Railroad, and the most recent lesson it has taught me is that North Carolina criminalized being black when the ratio of blacks to whites become worrying. Indentured servants from Europe were brought in and "the penniless black were replaced by the penniless white, except the whites weren't penniless at the end of the week." Eventual freedom, after earning enough to pay off passage, loomed for whites. Blacks found in North Carolina, free or fugitive, were lynched publically and strung up along the Freedom Trail. 

This book prompted me to watch the Netflix documentary 13th this week, about the 13th Amendment, and its disastrous loophole which granted freedom to everyone "except those convicted of crimes". The film demonstrates that mass incarceration for whatever crime is necessary has replaced slavery as a way to keep black men out of society's mainstream. 

Young Angela Davis

One segment of the film focuses on the history of Angela Davis, who was charged with aiding in a murderous scheme in 1970, at which point she was a professor of philosophy at UCLA. I had never heard of her, but was immediately compelled by her bravery, by the footage of her trial, by the seeming clarity of her commitment to communism and resistance against white tyranny. 

Davis, recently.

I looked her up in the nytimes archives, and found this smoking review of a biography of Davis. The biography was written by a white high school classmate of Davis', and the review was written, carved, by Toni Morrison. She takes the author to town for being a modern-day Harriet Beecher Stowe and presuming to tell the story of a black revolutionary - as if she could possibly know how a revolutionary black person's mind works, let alone is formed. Naturally, the biography gives all credit to white influences, and deems the subject "kind and funny."

Read the review here.