The Many Names of Slavery | March 9

Slavery in the nineteenth century. Convict labor and leasing in the twentieth. Mass incarceration in the twenty-first. Is there a throughline? The roots of today’s inequities in Texas can be traced to the state’s settlement by cotton farmers traveling west from the southern United States. Andrew J. Torget (March 2), Jay Jenkins (March 9), and Sandra Guerra Thompson (March 23) will guide us to a more informed and nuanced view of Texas history and the efforts to address and end persistent and corrosive race-based public policies. us to a more informed and nuanced view of Texas history and the efforts to address and end persistent and corrosive race-based public policies.

March 9: Jay Jenkins is the Harris County project attorney for the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, where he promotes broad justice reforms across Texas. Mr. Jenkins is the president and co-founder (with the late Reginald Moore) of the Convict Leasing and Labor Project. The CLLP builds on years of research assembled by Mr. Moore and is dedicated to researching and publicizing the convict-leasing system and its connection to modern prison slavery. Their work has become nationally known as the result of the 2018 discovery of the remains of 95 African-Americans on a Fort Bend Independent School District construction site.