“The true evil of American slavery was the narrative we created to justify it.”

Gates’s book focuses on The Legacy of Enslavement in the US. He views the justifications of enslavement, notably, white supremacy, as more harmful than involuntary servitude and forced labor. The North defeated the South in the Civil War, but the South created a powerful narrative that continues to impact Black Americans.

“I often wonder if Frederick Douglass and his fellow abolitionists could have imagined the extent to which this antiblack racist discourse would remain very much alive in American society a century and a half after the end of the Civil War.”

Gates is drawing connections between the past and present in this passage. Much of Chapter 1 centers on these connections, stressing the impact of the post-Reconstruction era on contemporary American politics. Despite over a century passing between the abolitionists’ plight and modern day, racist discourse is still a part of society.

“It is difficult to imagine any act more revolutionary than the redistribution of land from the planters to the slaves in the former Confederacy.”

This quote addresses a bold and transformative act taken by the federal government in 1865, namely, the redistribution of plantation lands to formerly enslaved people in the southern US. Shortly thereafter, however, President Johnson reversed the plans, only allowing formerly enslaved people who had paid for their lands to remain on them.