re: #168 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

The Civil War was also about the spread of slavery to the new territories, remember that there was a full-fledged war going on in Kansas for years before the shooting started in Virginia…

Right, that was the whole premise of the Republican Party’s founding. Yep Bloody Kansas. What I’m talking about here though is how even if the 13th amendment did formally abolish slavery, it wasn’t like things become sunshine and flowers for African-Americans after that. The sharecropping system was awful in its own way and while we did learn about it in school, we didn’t learn the extent of it. I also wish we could have learned more about the Great Migration too. Reading Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns was such a fascinating read for me because I definitely thought about all the African-Americans I knew growing up who no doubt had parents or grandparents that left the rural South for more urban areas.