In 1787, the U.S. Constitution was amended to include the Fugitive Slave Clause. This clause made it illegal for enslaved persons to free themselves through escape, and legally required them to be returned to their enslavers. In enshrining this in the Constitution, it also nullified state laws that protected enslaved persons from being returned to their enslaver if they reached a Northern state that abolished slavery. However, as Southern enslavers were unsatisfied with the resistance they encountered when attempting to retrieve their escaped slaves, the U.S. government attempted to mollify them with a stronger law. In 1793, The Fugitive Slave Law was passed by Congress. This law declared that any escaped enslaved person must be returned to their enslaver, regardless of what state in which they were recaptured, and that anyone assisting in their escape would be fined $500 and given a year in prison.

As has been the default in this country since its inception, the growing tensions between the slavery-loving South and the abolitionist North led to Congress further appeasing the Southern whites demanding the right to prevent their enslaved Blacks from freeing themselves. Prioritizing the injured profits of white enslavers, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 solidified the federal government’s protection of white enslavers’ legal right to enslave humans. Critically, a key feature of this law was to deprive enslaved Blacks of due process — the right to argue their right to freedom in court. Depriving escaping enslaved Blacks of due process avoided the pesky involvement of any official courts who could protect the Black enslaved person’s attempt to flee situations that even white Americans might grudgingly conclude were excessively harmful. Now anyone could be deputized to snatch an enslaved Black person off the street in the North.

After the Civil War ended, concessions to white Southern traitors newly welcomed back into the United States, were then enacted across the U.S. to continue the legal exploitation of Black Americans. In 1865 the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery … ”except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This exception has allowed the U.S. to continue to legally enslave convicted Americans without compensation. To feed this freshly legal form of enslavement, new codes criminalizing Black lives sprang up. These Black codes led to Jim Crow laws that created legal ways to re-enslave Black Americans for infractions such as not having a job, being outside at night, or simply offending a white person with their presence. Convict labor could then be purchased by the same whites who relied on cheap slave labor to rake in profits. To this day, convict slave labor (largely comprised of Black Americans who are disproportionately arrested and convicted of crimes that white Americans disproportionately have overlooked and overturned) is a major profit driver of most large corporations in America.

The Black codes and Jim Crow laws in the United States were so successful in criminalizing Black people’s existence, that in 1935 Nazi Germany used American Black Codes as the basis and inspiration for the laws they created to enshrine their racism against Jews into law, ultimately leading to concentration camps and mass extermination.

I have been arguing to my white colleagues that the criminalization of being on U.S. soil if you are not white and MAGA-supporting is the endgame of this current administration, and as such, any conversations about how communities respond to attempts to kidnap and disappear people deemed “illegal” by the administration should not focus on what is “legal.” As a Black American, my legal rights depend on the agreement of my ownership of those rights by those who can harm or kill me if they disagree with my attempts to assert those constitutional rights. Countless Black Americans have been killed while exercising their rights to call the police for help, to drive their car with minor problems such as a broken tail light, and their right to be in public spaces regardless of whether or not the white people around them wish them to exist in those spaces.

“States rights” is a euphemism used by southerners to this day to defend the Confederacy and the continuation of Confederate ideologies that are now nurtured comfortably in the highest government offices in the country. The Articles of Secession of many Southern states clearly announce that they were seceding from the United States over their claimed legal right to own Black humans as chattel slaves in perpetuity. Historically, white people in this country have been willing to die to protect their perceived constitutional rights to own, abuse, exploit, and kill anyone they deem unequal to them — particularly if that person is Black or brown.

My sixth-great-grandmother ignored the laws that stated that she and her children were required to remain enslaved in Pennsylvania, and ran to freedom with them, almost certainly assisted by white people who chose to defy laws that required her to continue to be owned with no recourse for escape. My family’s legal freedoms exist at the whim of those who are in power in this country. U.S. law, and the laws of all countries, are largely based on the governments’ level of agreement or disagreement to enshrine corruption and inhumanity into the fabric of the country. Therefore, the question is never whether or not something is legal or illegal according to current law, but whether or not it is humane or inhumane.

When considering what side of history with which to align, I don’t care what laws are written, or whether or not a person presents me with a legal document stating their right to harm or treat someone as less than a human. I do not care what laws the current government enacts, no matter who is in charge of that government. Because in the U.S., thousands of my family members were legally enslaved over hundreds of years, and I will never forget that fact.

Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton and works in Greenfield.