A New Chapter in the Black Liberation Movement

In the following essay, the American historian Erik Loomis (1974–) draws our attention to a recent development in the centuries-long struggle for black liberation. In public and for-profit prisons, prisoners—the vast majority of them black—are forced to sell their labor for next to nothing. This is tantamount to modern slavery. All across America, prisoners are organizing and striking to stop this long-standing practice of “prison slavery.”