Book Plug
1619-2026 United States Justice: Just Us, or is it Just Me? is presented here as companion reading for the site's work on U.S. historical erasure, Black land loss, public memory, policing, punishment, reparations, and the moral meaning of justice.
Written by former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Torkwase Sekou, the book appears to confront the gap between America's stated ideals of justice and the lived reality of African-descended people from slavery through the present day.
The title asks whether American justice has ever truly meant equal justice, or whether it has too often meant "just us" - a system protecting some while policing, punishing, and marginalizing others.
Why It Belongs Near the U.S. Erasure Article
The Ancestral Egbe article U.S. Erasure of Black History as a Control System argues that erasure is not only about missing facts. It is about power: who gets remembered, who gets framed as dangerous, whose labor is extracted, whose land is taken, whose institutions are destroyed, and whose suffering is made invisible.
This book belongs beside that conversation because legal memory and historical memory cannot be separated. A justice system that forgets 1619, enslavement, Black Codes, convict leasing, racial terror, land theft, redlining, mass incarceration, and police violence cannot honestly explain the conditions it claims to judge.
Not Merely History
This is not merely a history book. It is likely a witness text: part legal critique, part racial truth-telling, and part moral challenge to the American conscience.
The value of a work like this is not only in the record it gathers. It is in the question it forces readers to carry: if justice has been promised for centuries, who has received it, who has been denied it, and what repair is required now?
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Use this page as a bridge from the site's justice-memory work into Judge Sekou's legal and historical reflection.