Following a historical timeline, DuVernay presents how the Civil Rights Movement was blamed for crime, how 'mass incarceration' became part of the vernacular in the 1970's and how Nixon and Reagan's 'War on Drugs' and 'Law and Order' campaigns resulted in increasing, racially motivated arrests. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation." We learn that it was Griffith who invented the cross burning for its cinematic effect. Black men were demonized in popular culture, the most egregious example being D.W.
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As convicted prisoners, they were used as leased labor.
#13th film reaction free#
Immediately after Blacks were made Free Men, they were arrested in vast numbers for such minor crimes as loitering and vagrancy.
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The ratification of the 13th amendment had a profound effect on the economy of the South, which had been built upon slave labor.
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Director Ava DuVernay ("Selma") hones in on the line 'except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted' from the 1865 amendment which abolished slavery in the United States and sets out to prove that it has been systematically used since the date the amendment was passed to enforce slavery under a different name in "13th." Employing the typical PBS format of talking heads interspersed with archival footage, photographic stills and headlines, DuVernay builds a powerful case that racial inequality in the United States has been a deliberate goal of politicians and corporations, particularly in regard to incarceration.