Mississippi failed to make slavery’s abolition official until 2013
Evidence
Although chattel slavery ended legally in December 1865, when Georgia became the twenty-seventh state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, the institutionalized racism of slavery refused to die with it. (Mississippi was the last state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, on March 16, 1995, nearly 130 years later, but it did not notify the US archivist, which did not make the ratification official until 2013.) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 45
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects to the ‘hidden history’ pillar of Brown’s three-part architecture — this is a concrete instance of the buried record she catalogs. Also a useful CANDY-adjacent trivia point.
- CANDY: The single fact that Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment only in 2013 is an easy, punchy conversational hook.