Book review of Of Greed and Glory by Deborah G. Plant

Dr. Deborah Plant is an unbiased scholar of African American Literature and Africana Studies and a former Africana and English professor on the University of South Florida. She is an knowledgeable on the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston and edited Baracoon, Hurston’s posthumously revealed account of the final survivor of the transatlantic slave commerce. She is just not, nevertheless, a historian.

Yet Plant’s newest ebook, Of Greed and Glory: In Pursuit of Freedom of All is largely a piece of historic nonfiction. In it, she explores how the wording of the thirteenth Amendment set the stage for the incarceration of thousands and thousands of African Americans, who in flip supplied unpaid labor that enriched their captors. Intended to ban slavery, the thirteenth Amendment exempts “the duly convicted” from its protections, that’s, those that have been convicted of against the law. Plant establishes a direct line from this loophole by means of the Black Codes and Jim Crow legal guidelines to immediately’s mass incarceration, which disproportionately imprisons Black folks. In different phrases, removed from prohibiting slavery, the thirteenth Amendment enabled it to proceed underneath the colour of legislation.

While Of Greed and Glory is grounded in historic reality, it’s not a historical past. Instead, it’s a deeply subjective ebook, drenched with the sorrow and rage Plant feels about her brother’s unjust lifetime sentence for rape he didn’t commit. Most historians keep away from subjectivity, however right here, subjectivity is the purpose. The inhumanity and degradation ensuing from the exploitation of the “duly convicted” clause leads to the objectification of broad swaths of the inhabitants. By sharing her brother’s expertise, Plant asserts that he and others like him have the fitting to be the autonomous sovereigns of their very own lives, and not the nameless targets of an unjust system.

This is an emotional and passionate ebook, uncooked in its grief and anger, but in addition imbued with hope for redemption. Based on goal historic reality and subjective expertise, Of Greed and Glory has the ability of a sermon and the urgency of a manifesto.