Bipartisan no-brainer: Can we all agree our Constitution shouldn’t allow slavery? | Opinion
I hope members of the General Assembly read reporter Beth Musgrave’s recent story about a youth group from South Elkhorn Christian Church.
In 2022, these young people visited civil rights sites in Alabama, including the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, which traces the direct line between slavery and our modern criminal justice system. It was founded by civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, better known for the book and movie, “Just Mercy.”
The young people came back outraged that Kentucky’s Constitution still has language that allows slavery as punishment for a crime.
That’s right. Section 25 of our state’s guiding document says, “Slavery and involuntary servitude in this state are forbidden, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
It’s the exception clause to the U.S.’s 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery after the Civil War. At the time, many businesses and land owners, who had been dependent on free labor, wanted the next best thing. As Musgrave reported, “repressive 19th-century laws in the South known as Black Codes that allowed authorities to incarcerate Black people for petty crimes, such as vagrancy, and then force them to work. Black Codes were a precursor to the Jim Crow laws outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
It was so profitable for southern states that Black people were often arrested on fake charges and turned into convict laborers.
The youth group decided they should lead the charge to get rid of this language, which most states already have done. Enter state Rep. Killian Timoney, R-Lexington, and state Sen. Gerald Neal, D-Louisville, who have pledged to file bills in each house. Any changes in Constitutional language have to be approved by Kentucky voters. So their bills will have to authorize changing or eliminating Section 25 on the 2024 ballot.
Timoney told me he would be working with both the youth group and students across Fayette County to get support and ideas for the bill.
“This is going to be my lesson plan,” said Timoney, a former government teacher. “I want to engage students in the process in what we’re doing and what we have to do. It’s the right thing to do and way overdue.”
Easy, right? It should and could be, but in Frankfort, not much is.
For one thing, this effort has failed in places like Louisiana, where voters were warned the change in language would forbid prisons from ever using convicts for labor, like picking up trash on highways. Timoney said the ballot language can easily make that distinction.
What’s more complicated — and ironic — is that this good idea may depend solely on the politics of a very bad one.
Constitutional amendments have to pass both chambers with three-fifths of the vote. Then it would go on the ballot. But Kentucky Republicans are far more invested in changing the Constitution to allow public school money to flow to private schools. If they perceive in any way that removing the language of slavery from the Constitution could interfere with their decision to cripple public schools, they’ll nix it.
Or the number of conservatives who come out to support a school choice bill could doom something perceived as “woke.” Although if being anti-slavery is now woke, we’re in bigger trouble than I thought.
This can be easy if everyone in both parties works in good faith to make it happen. Slavery is our original sin, and Section 25 is a reminder of all the ways it still haunts us. Symbols are important, and Kentucky has enough image problems. Let’s not make language supporting slavery one of them.
