Featuring: Larry Kenneth Alexander
Transcript:
Today, we confront an extralegal colonial practice that continues to cast its long shadow over our collective history—a practice born not of justice, but of corruption. This practice arose from colonial governments driven by lawlessness and unbridled greed. It is the enactment of slave laws within the 13 American colonies, laws that improvidently defined the lives of Black colonials through four principal legal categories: the term of servitude, marriage and family, police and disciplinary powers, and property and civil rights. These categories, though distinct, flowed from a single fountainhead of oppression and racial tyranny.
This oppression began with the enactment of the first hereditary slave law in 1662 by Virginia’s colonial legislature. With this law, a terrible scheme was codified: a human being’s status as a servant was no longer temporary but became a permanent condition. This condition was passed down like a family heirloom of sorrow from one generation to the next, condemning not just individuals, but their children, grandchildren, and untold descendants to servitude.
Yet a striking truth emerges when this system of degradation is analyzed through the lens of English jurisprudence of the time. There was no lawfully recognized status of “slave” within the British kingdom. Moreover, neither Virginia’s colonial assembly nor any other had the legislative power to enact a slave law. This system—this machinery of oppression—was an extralegal construct, the product of colonial corruption, graft, and criminal conspiracy. These colonial governments, unchecked and unregulated, created a framework of enslavement that had no grounding in the principles of British law.
For decades, the British imperial government turned a blind eye, permitting the cancer of slavery to metastasize under the guise of economic necessity. This unofficial policy of salutary neglect allowed colonial assemblies to grow bold, enshrining practices that were as unjust as they were unlawful. It was not until Parliament’s American Colonies Act of 1766, amidst the broader tightening of imperial control over the American colonies, that this permissiveness disappeared. The act abolished all laws that denied or questioned Parliament’s supreme legislative power.
The colonial slave statutes were never legitimate. They were born of greed, sustained by violence, and abolished by the British imperial government’s American Colonies Act, 10 years before the Declaration of Independence in 1776. If colonial slave statutes and laws had been legal at the time America declared its independence, this claim should be easy to support. Yet, it cannot.
Thus, we have an unambiguous path forward, illuminated by the harsh truth of our colonial history. Let us not look upon this history with passive regret. Let us confront it with the full force of our understanding. In recognizing the roots of these injustices, we arm ourselves against their recurrence. The extralegal actions taken in the 1660s remind us of the immense power of law and how custom shapes our societies, for better or worse. They warn us of the dangers of unchecked economic ambition and the dehumanization it can breed.
Most importantly, they call us to remember the humanity of those who were denied it—those who lived, labored, and died under a system that sought to erase their very existence. History demands that we speak truth to power. Let us declare that these slave statutes were null and void when America declared its independence from England. Justice under the rule of law demands that we act upon this truth. And humanity demands that we remember, so that such a betrayal of law and conscience may never again take root in our society.
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