Staff writer
According to Hofstra University professor and historian Alan Singer, Ahmaud Arbery arrest and subsequent murder was the result of deep, entrenched and racist legacy of citizen’s arrest laws.
The federal government between 1793 – 1850 passed fugitive slaves laws that sanctioned Blacks could be stopped, whether they were free or not. The burden of proof fell upon them to ascertain their free status.
White vigilantes arrests were common in order to maintain free labor the cotton plantations ‘needed’.
These white slave patrol militias together with some former Confederate soldiers morphed into the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War in 1865 onward and effectively used citizen’s arrest laws to keep the newly freed blacks to a permanent servitude or second class status.
The current law enforcement apparatuses aspects have been built on this history and prevalening attitudes.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175619
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Footnotes:
The Civil War (Apr 12, 1861 – Apr 9, 1865) – The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States fought between the Union and the Confederacy. The central cause of the war was the status of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery into territories acquired as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican–American War. (Wikipedia)
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) – an American white supremacist terrorist hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Catholics, Native Americans as well as immigrants, leftists, homosexuals, Muslims and atheists. (Wikipedia)
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