Today is Juneteenth, a holiday that marks the day that slavery finally ended in Texas -- two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
We don’t often think of Connecticut as a slave state and often celebrate the role of Connecticut’s abolitionists. Yet American slavery was not just confined to the South.
There were an estimated 5,100 enslaved people who lived and worked right here in Connecticut.
Moreover, Connecticut’s economy was deeply intertwined with the institution of slavery in the American South and West Indies. It’s an economic legacy that is still with us as a state today.
As we commemorate the Juneteenth holiday and reflect on the legacy of slavery in this country, we revisit a 2018 conversation with Jenifer Frank, co-author of Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. The book grew out of a 2002 special report by Hartford Courant journalists in the Courant's Northeast Magazine.
