Not just in Mississippi, it's everywhere.

"The first question I get when I tell people I live in the Mississippi Delta is, 'Why'?" wrote Jemar Tisby. "Nothing stands between you and the stories you hear about slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement." Jim Crow laws were enacted by Democrats to enforce segregation of blacks and whites. The original Jim Crow was a deformed black slave whose song was copied by a white man Thomas Dartmouth (TD) 'Daddy' Rice who would blacken his face to perform in front of white audiences. "In our town, the Confederate cemetery, which now sits in the corner of a larger cemetery, was meant only for white people. A completely separate plot of land in another part of town, unkempt and underfunded by comparison, was reserved for deceased black people," wrote Tisby. The initial wealth of the United States came from export of cotton which was built on slavery. "If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth richest in the world at the start of the civil war." "By the start of the war, the South was producing 75 percent of the world's cotton and creating more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. Slaves represented Southern planters' most significant investment -- and the bulk of their wealth." Edward E Baptist has written a book -- 'The half has never been told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism'. Slavery was highly productive, he says, "The incentive is if you don't do this you'll get whipped -- or worse." It was this that turned the US "from being a colonial, primarily agricultural economy to being the second biggest industrial power in the world". Slavery may have ended in the US but it continues in other parts of the world. Bonded labor is a form of slavery practiced in India, where entire families are made to work for no wages to pay off loans they took to deal with sudden emergencies, such as severe illness. Particularly, appalling is the use of children as bonded laborers to pay for loans taken by their parents. Kailash Satyarthi received a Nobel Prize in 2014 for his campaign to end this pernicious practice in India and in the world. In India, "Some 174 children go missing everyday. Only about 50% of them are ever found again." Thousands of girls and women are abducted or tricked with promises of well-paid jobs and sold into prostitution. "The United States is again ranked as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking," according to a recent report by the State Department. But no nation can beat China which arrests Falun Gong members on fictitious charges and then harvests organs of healthy people for transplants. Tisby is angry that "racism never really goes away" but he should also remember the hundreds of thousands of whites who died in the Civil War to abolish slavery in the US. The story of slavery is the history of human brutality, but also of Lincoln and Satyarthi and the many who died fighting it. Perhaps, we should not lose hope.