History is not behind us. It lives in our laws, institutions, literature, language, memories, and the stories a nation chooses to tell—or forget. Lest We Forget gathers my writing on slavery, racial terror, segregation, punishment, Black history, literature, and personal memory to examine how the American past continues to shape the American present.
These essays are not arranged as a chronology. They are organized as an argument: that Black history is American history, that memory is evidence, and that understanding the present requires confronting what came before it.
Begin with the featured essays below, then continue through the site’s related subject archives and Justice Chronicles.
Slavery, Reconstruction & the Architecture of American Racial Power
The institutions of racial control did not disappear; they changed form. These essays trace continuities from slavery through Reconstruction, segregation, and modern systems of punishment.
The Three Pillars of American Society: Slavery, Segregation, and Hyperincarceration
A central thesis of this archive, this essay argues that slavery, segregation, and hyperincarceration are not disconnected eras but successive structures in the American racial order. Read essay →
The “new” Jim Crow is as old as the Union
This essay challenges the idea that racialized punishment is a modern development by tracing its logic back through the nation’s constitutional and political foundations. Read essay →
A Comparison of New York State Laws and Regulations and Slave Codes
Drawing on legal research begun decades ago, this essay documents striking parallels between slave codes and later systems regulating incarcerated people. Read essay →
A Brief History of the Hayes-Tilden Compromise
By revisiting the political bargain that ended Reconstruction, this essay shows how national reconciliation was purchased at the expense of Black citizenship and protection. Read essay →
Explore more writing on race, history and American society →
Racial Terror, Lynching & the Defense of White Supremacy
Lynching and racial terror were not eruptions outside the American system. They were instruments for maintaining racial hierarchy, reinforced by law, silence, custom, and collective memory.
Ida B. Wells: The Black Woman Crusader Against White Knights
This essay places Ida B. Wells at the center of the struggle to expose lynching as organized racial terror rather than spontaneous mob violence. Read essay →
Returning to Wells’s documentation of lynching, this essay examines how the excuses once used to justify racial murder continue to echo in American life. Read essay →
Emmett Till, August 28, 1955: The Black Blood of Poetry and the Memory of Racial Terror
Through Emmett Till and the title poem of The Black Blood of Poetry, this essay joins historical memory, racial terror, and poetic form. Read essay →
Blood at the Root: Then and Now
This essay connects the historical spectacle of lynching to the persistence of anti-Black violence and the cultural memory carried through poetry and literature. Read essay →
Policing, Punishment & the Criminal Legal System
The history of punishment is also a history of race, political power, public fear, and contested definitions of justice. These essays examine that history through law, advocacy, policing, prisons, and lived experience.
The Anatomy of Advocacy – In High Heels
Using the campaign against lifetime parole, this essay shows how disciplined advocacy, persistence, and directly affected leadership can change entrenched criminal-justice policy. Read essay →
This continuation of the advocacy story examines the human and political consequences of lifetime supervision and the long struggle to undo punitive policy. Read essay →
Beginning with the Rockefeller Drug Laws, this essay traces a political journey through punishment, prison expansion, and the creation of modern mass incarceration in New York. Read essay →
White Sheets Under Black Robes
Through Judge Bruce Wright and Black Robes, White Justice, this essay examines race, judicial power, and the enduring tension between formal law and substantive justice. Read essay →
Black History Is American History
Black history is not a sidebar to the national story. It is central to the formation of American politics, culture, education, law, resistance, and identity.
A Brief History of How “Black History” is Seen
This essay argues that separating Black history from American history distorts both, reducing a central national story to a seasonal or specialized subject. Read essay →
One Hundred Years of Black History
Linking the centennial of Black History Month to the life of the author’s father, this essay turns family history into a lens for understanding a century of American change. Read essay →
From The Miseducation of the Negro to Critical Race Theory
By connecting Carter G. Woodson’s critique of education to contemporary battles over Critical Race Theory, this essay examines who controls the teaching of American history. Read essay →
From the American Revolution to the Black Arts Cultural Revolution
This essay follows Black political and cultural struggle across American history to show how movements for freedom repeatedly reshape the nation’s identity. Read essay →
Literature, Poetry & Cultural Memory
Literature does more than reflect history. It interprets it, contests it, preserves what official narratives neglect, and gives language to experiences that history alone cannot contain.
James Baldwin’s Journey Through Politics
Through Baldwin and the politics of crime, race, and American power, this essay shows how literary criticism can become a form of political analysis. Read essay →
Beginning with Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas, this essay explores the persistence of racial fear and the recurring American invention of the threatening Black male. Read essay →
This essay situates the Black Arts Movement within a longer tradition of cultural rebellion in which art becomes a weapon, a declaration, and a means of self-definition. Read essay →
The Writing Life: Writing An Award-Winning Epic Poem
Looking back at the making of Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass, this essay reveals how historical research, poetry, and racial memory converge in the writing process. Read essay →
Personal Memory as Historical Witness
History is also carried through families, encounters, grief, migration, recollection, and lived experience. In these essays, personal memory becomes another form of historical evidence.
Recalling a personal encounter with Thomas Hagan, this essay collapses the distance between a defining historical assassination and one individual’s lived memory. Read essay →
Through the life and death of the author’s father, this essay explores the quiet inheritance of segregation, migration, literature, and Southern Black experience. Read essay →
This essay brings a father’s World War II generation into conversation with the murder of Maceo Snipes, joining family remembrance to the history of Black voting rights and racial violence. Read essay →
The Assassination of Dr. King — My first “political memory”
Beginning with a seven-year-old’s memory of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, this essay examines how national trauma becomes part of a child’s political consciousness. Read essay →
Freedom, Citizenship & the Unfinished American Argument
America’s promises of liberty and equality have always existed beside exclusions from those promises. These essays examine citizenship, emancipation, reparations, independence, and the continuing argument over what America is—and should become.
Through poetry and history, this essay reflects on emancipation, Lincoln, slavery, and the complicated distance between declarations of freedom and freedom itself. Read essay →
Centering Frederick Douglass’s indictment of American hypocrisy, this essay asks what national independence means to people historically excluded from its promises. Read essay →
Racial Reckoning & Reparations
This essay questions whether the United States can claim a racial reckoning without confronting the material and historical consequences of slavery and anti-Black exclusion. Read essay →
Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday: A Reflection
Written at the nation’s semiquincentennial, this essay measures America’s founding ideals against its racial history and asks what kind of leadership its future requires. Read essay →
Continue Exploring the Archive
The essays above form a curated Lest We Forget pathway through the site’s larger body of writing on race, history, memory, literature, politics, and justice.
To continue beyond this gateway, explore the site’s wider subject archives or move into Justice Chronicles for writing focused on law, punishment, reentry, race, and systems of justice.
William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters 