Jesse Washington was not enslaved in the legal sense, he was born in 1897, more than three decades after slavery was abolished in the United States by the 13th Amendment in 1865. However, while Jesse Washington was technically free, he lived in the Jim Crow South, where racism, racial terror, and financial exploitation functioned as a continuation of slavery by other means. He was a farm worker in Waco, Texas and he was poor, illiterate, and mentally challenged. His lynching in 1916 was part of a broader campaign of white terror designed to keep Black Americans in a state of fear and submission a psychological and physical extension of slavery...