In August 1619, 20 enslaved Africans disembarked an English pirate ship off the coast of Virginia. Four hundred years later the legacies of slavery and racial caste remain the most defining features about U.S. society. From the widening wealth chasm to hyper criminalization and mass incarceration, descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States are, indeed, the lowest caste.

Racial disparities in sentencing and incarceration underscore the injustice of U.S. society. On Aug. 28, an Alabama judge granted clemency to an African American who had spent 36 years in prison on a life sentence without parole. His crime? Alvin Kennard robbed $50.75 from a bakery in 1983. Because he pleaded guilty in 1979 to three counts of burglary and larceny, Kennard was an easy target for Alabama’s Habitual Felony Offender Act, which white legislators passed in 1979 as part of a national shift towards punitive sentencing.

Mass incarceration disproportionately affects African American men, who have a one-in-three chance of incarceration, compared to one-in-17 for white men, and one-in-six for Latino men. Annually, U.S. corrections cost taxpayers $265 billion.

In a racial caste society, injustice is the through line that connects the generations. Kennard’s adversity is reminiscent of a 1958 Alabama civil rights case that captivated the international community, compelling many around the world, including over 3,000 ordinary Canadians, to write letters demanding clemency from the governor.

Known as “death for a dollar ninety-five” case, the State of Alabama sentenced 55-year-old African American Jimmy Wilson to the electric chair in August 1958 for allegedly robbing Estelle Barker, an elderly white widow.

Wilson, in fact, had requested a loan against his wages from Barker, an understanding at which the two parties had arrived in the past. Not only did Barker accuse Wilson of robbery and break-and-enter, but also attempted rape, the foulest stereotype in the white supremacist handbook for legitimizing terror against black men.

While radio station CKEY broke the news on Canadian airwaves on Aug. 28, the Toronto Daily Star’s Martin Goodman provided impeccable reporting in the print media. In fact, Goodman was among a couple of reporters who broke the news of Wilson’s fate to the world.

Weeks before Wilson’s scheduled execution, Goodman travelled to Atmore State Penitentiary, roughly 200 kilometres south of Montgomery, where he exclusively interviewed Wilson. Goodman also interviewed Barker’s white neighbours, all of whom doubted the octogenarian’s allegations of robbery and attempted rape.

In his childhood, Goodman’s family left Western Canada due to anti-Semitism. As a Jew in the Deep South, he understood his own precarity and the risks of standing up for black folk. A case in point: Six years after Goodman’s investigative reporting in rural Alabama, Klansmen in Mississippi lynched African American civil rights worker James Chaney and his white Jewish collaborators Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

Goodman’s uncompromising journalism helped inspire 3,000 plus petitions penned by Canadians. The archive is replete with examples of Canadians’ frustration with the evils of U.S. white supremacy. “It soon became apparent to me,” wrote one white Canadian woman, “that this man was being executed not for robbery, but for the ‘alleged’, mind you, just ‘ALLEGED’, assault of a white woman.” Another white petitioner wrote, “The people in the U.S.A. are terrible narrow-minded about the negros [sic].”

The sententious tone in which many white Canadians expressed their outrage over U.S. racism points to a society undergoing a shift in racial attitudes while mostly blinded to its own brand of racism. Nevertheless, this show of Canadian self-assertion proved a major victory for the post-war global human rights struggle. When the governor of Alabama received a flurry of letters from Toronto on Sept. 13, 1958, he finally conceded to the national and international pressure and granted Jimmy Wilson clemency.

Jimmy Wilson, Alvin Kennard and legions of African American men and women have suffered and continue to suffer unfathomable racism in the United States.

After the U.S. Civil War, the euphoria of citizenship and social incorporation during the Reconstruction years quickly turned into a nightmare as former Confederate soldiers terrorized the formerly enslaved and overthrew democratically elected black statesmen from office.

White supremacists eviscerated the 14th and 15th Constitutional Amendments, which, respectively, granted African Americans birthright citizenship and voting rights. The 13th Amendment — which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime — effectively left a back door open for white legislators to criminalize poor and illiterate African Americans.

As a result, white legislators in the South used Black Codes and vagrancy laws to re-enslave many African Americans after Reconstruction ended in 1877. Convict leasing and debt peonage — what Douglas Blackmon called “industrial slavery” in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Slavery by Another Name” — enriched southern states, such as Alabama, and private entities, such as U.S. Steel Corporation, by extracting labour from blacks at a fraction of the cost.

Mass incarceration and unjust sentencing are vestiges of slavery and its offspring racial caste. It is for this reason why the opioid outbreak, which is devastating white communities, has not generated a moral panic that criminalizes users like the crack cocaine crisis.

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Instead, an Oklahoma judge awarded the state almost $600 million in damages from the drug maker Johnson & Johnson, an act of restitution unthinkable for poor African Americans. For African Americans and black people in general, no amount of model behavior and good works can protect one from the tentacles of a legal system that cares more about subordinating and subjugating black bodies than meting out justice.

After 400 years of demanding justice and equality, the future for African descendants in the United States still looks grim. Will the United States ever ensure true justice and equality for descendants of enslaved Africans?