Slavery Today – w/ James Brewer Stewart

Teaching Hard History

Learning for Justice

History, Courses, Education

4.2 • 588 Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2018

⏱️ 71 minutes

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Summary

Enslavement didn't end with Emancipation. Historian James Brewer Stewart discusses modern-day slavery happening across the world—and right here in the U.S. – showing educators how to connect the past with the present.

Visit the show notes for this episode to find a complete transcript and a list of resources to help you teach the ideas explored by our guests.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On December 4, 1947, Elmore Bowling, a 30-year-old black businessman in Lowndes County, Alabama,
0:09.1	was murdered in cold blood near his home. An NWACP report documenting the lynching described
0:16.6	Bowling's body as having been riddled by shotgun and pistol shots. Clark Lucky, one of Bowling's
0:24.2	white neighbors, admitted publicly to having orchestrated the murder and justified his actions
0:30.8	by claiming that Bowling had insulted his wife over the telephone. But NAACP investigators uncovered the truth behind the killing.
0:41.4	They found that bowling was simply, and I quote,
0:44.8	too prosperous as a Negro farmer.
0:48.8	The lynching of Elmore Bowling was neither the first nor the last
0:53.3	that occurred in Lowndes County during
0:55.4	the century after emancipation. White's lynched Theo Callaway in 1888. Will Jones in 1914. The brothers
1:06.2	Will and Jesse Powell in 1970. 16-year-old Neil Gwynn in 1931,
1:13.6	Jim Buccellus in 1933, organizer Jim Press, Meriwether in 1935, and Roosevelt Thompson in
1:23.6	1942. I discovered these lynchings while conducting research for my dissertation about the civil
1:30.4	rights movement in Lowndes County, and I was struck by the fact that none of the white
1:35.8	people who had committed these atrocities hid their identities. No one wore a mask when they
1:42.6	killed black people in Lowndes County, and no one went to jail.
1:48.3	So I swore that I would not only identify in my dissertation the victims of racial terror in Louns
1:54.8	County so that people would have to say their names, but I would also identify their murderers, so their names would be said
2:03.5	to. It was a promise I kept. I also promised a local grassroots activist that I would send her
2:11.0	a copy of the dissertation when I was done. I kept that promise too.
2:30.1	Several years after I finished the dissertation, I received an email from Mrs. Joe McCall, the daughter of Elmore Bowling, who wrote to thank me for my research.
2:36.7	Apparently, copies of my dissertation had been floating around Lounds County like some kind of underground mixtape, and a friend of hers who knew she was looking into the death of her father
	...

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