What It Means to Bury My Ancestors Twice

My ancestors are buried at Oak Hill Plantation in Pittsylvania County, Virginia—sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and formerly enslaved people whose labor built wealth they never inherited. When they died, they were granted only conditional respect. In life and in death, they were treated as less than fully human.

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That logic is as old as the nation itself. In 1787, at the Constitutional Convention, lawmakers seeking to preserve Southern political power adopted the Three-Fifths Compromise...