"[It] was the Civil War that brought this system crashing down 150 years ago. 200,000 freed slaves joined with hundreds of thousands of small farmers, workers, immigrants, and others in the Union Army and militarily crushed the slave owners. While slavery was defeated, racism was not. 150 years after the Civil War, there are more black men ensnared in the U.S. criminal justice system than there were slaves in 1850, as Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, has pointed out. Today, it’s Wall Street and their capitalist system that perpetuates the racist legacy of slavery."
1865: A Revolutionary Turning Point in U.S. History