This story is jaw dropping to me. As I read I felt tears coming on. Knowing that just because a man has success was the reason that the people killed him is devastating to me. Elmore Bolling had seven children and a wife. He had a business, he provided people with jobs, he had saved money in the bank. That was all gone with in months of his death. To think that these people probably don't even care what happens to the family or the people who had lost their jobs shows how cruel this world can be. It reminds me of everything that has been happening in our world today, how some people don't think of the life these people have.

This statement reminds me about the article defining spaghetti junction and how that highway in Atlanta had segregated two sides of town. The fact the people thought that because they changed the laws about slavery to the Black Code was ok is devastating. The criminal justice system coming up with new strategies of racial control shows that people can't let go of this haunting past. In the next sentence it states how the strategies intensified when ever black people asserted their independence or if they achieved any measure of success. You should not forget the past but you should learn from it, and become better.

The fact that the practice of mass incarceration and excessive punishment is the legacy of slavery, is sad. In the sentence before it states that even if your third strike is stealing a bicycle you can be sentenced for a life in prison. Several paragraphs before, Bryan Stevenson states that he was fighting for the release of a 16 year old who had been sentenced to die in prison. He was one in 62 of Louisiana's children sentenced to life imprisonment. The case that he argued was that in 2010 a ruling that had banned the same sentence for juveniles. The paragraph after explained how some had been in prison for almost 50 years. Most had been sent to Angola, a penitentiary that was considered one of America's most violent and abusive. It was once occupied by slave plantations. So when Bryan stated that is was a legacy of slavery I can see where he is coming from and I feel that it is very sad that this is the case.