“By a show of hands, how many folks here tonight are Freedmen?” Cornsilk asked into the microphone. Each raised an arm. Visibly dismayed, Cornsilk shook his head. It was a trick question.

“No,” Cornsilk said. “The Freedmen died a long time ago. You are not Freedmen. You are Cherokee, and it is time that you begin to recognize who you are.”

Cornsilk is Cherokee, and a self-taught civil rights advocate and genealogist. He traces his slave-owning ancestors back to their aboriginal lands of Georgia and Tennessee — to a period before the Trail of Tears. Cornsilk is not a Cherokee Freedmen descendant. For nearly two decades, however, Cornsilk fought for the citizenship rights of Freedmen descendants — blacks who descend from slaves once owned by Cherokee and other tribes.

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But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should wonder about one of the founders for whom that event is named. If branding matters, then the tradition of honoring perhaps the most systematic violator of human rights for America’s nonwhites should finally run its course.

Renowned journalist T.D. Allman’s gripping "Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State" argues that brutality was a habit of mind for party icon Andrew Jackson long before he laid the groundwork, as president, for the Trail of Tears, the thousand-mile death march that killed 4,000 Cherokees in 1838−39.

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The tide is clearly turning against state-sanctioned killing in the name of the law. What many Americans do not know is that debates about the death penalty are as old as the nation itself. What follows are five facts that every American should know about capital punishment and its history in the U.S.

1. The history of capital punishment is the history of slavery's attempts to destroy free speech.

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“A call for background checks evokes painful memories of Jim Crow and black codes,” somber text in the ad reads between black and white images of Klan rallies and a lynching. “Never again,” the controversial ad concludes, borrowing the term from Holocaust survivors.

The campaign, organized by Star Parker and her Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) is clearly meant to be provocative, and Parker helped crank up the controversy this week when she told Sean Hannity that women who have had abortions may be prohibited from by buying guns because the procedure is linked (erroneously) with mental illness.

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“History has shown us what the right position was, and those were issues that were attacked by people of faith aggressively to change the course of this country,” he said. “We need to fight for the respect for life, not just for life but for respect for life. One leads to the other.”

Blending the explosive emotional issues of abortion and slavery signaled a race quickly gaining heat as the only competitive gubernatorial campaign in America, showcasing stark partisan and ideological divides in a state that has been won twice by Democratic President Barack Obama, yet has a Republican governor and GOP-ruled Legislature.

Cuccinelli spokeswoman Anna Nix called the DPV video an effort by the presumptive Democratic gubernatorial nominee, former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, to shift the focus of the race away from job creation toward divisive issues. Neither McAuliffe nor Cuccinelli faces a challenger for the nomination.

“Instead, McAuliffe wants to take his experience as DNC Chairman and run a contentious campaign that divides Virginia. As attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli fights to protect the innocent. From victims of human trafficking and child pornography to those wrongly convicted of a crime, Ken will continue to speak for the weakest in our society,” Nix said.

Democrats contended that equating the struggle over institutionalized human bondage that led to the Civil War with abortion rights is improper in any context.

“By equating a woman’s constitutional right to make her own health care decisions with slavery, Ken Cuccinelli proved yet again that he is too extreme for Virginia,” said Lauren Harmon, executive director of the Democratic Party of Virginia.

Suggesting any moral equivalency between the abolition of slavery and the dispute over abortion is historically ignorant at best and outrageous at worst, said L. Douglas Wilder, a Virginia grandson of slaves and the nation’s first elected black governor.

“I would think that if Mr. Cuccinelli had a chance to reflect, he would refine his statements,” the Democratic former governor said Tuesday in an Associated Press telephone interview.

“It’s hurtful to me, but it’s a reminder that it’s ignorance. And this isn’t just relegated to white people. Any number of persons of African descent have no idea about slavery and its effects,” Wilder said.

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The panel was run by K. Carl Smith, of the Frederick Douglass Republicans, who mostly advised the predominantly white audience that if they're "sick and tired of being called a racist and a sellout" they should join the Frederick Douglass Republicans. You "can't play the race card on him, you can't play the class warfare card on him," Smith said of Douglass.

"Race-baiting comes off the table" when you say you are a Frederick Douglass Republican, he said, noting that there are both black and white members of the group. "How are you going to call a Frederick Douglass Republican racist?"

One audience member, Scott Terry, a self-professed white Southerner,  asked why members of "my demographic are systematically disenfranchised," and why it's "anathema" to be proud of Southern heritage. When Smith told him that Douglass forgave his slavemaster, Terry replied: “For giving him shelter? And food?”

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On Thursday, NY1 revealed the story of a New York public school that has been doling out some incredibly unorthodox homework. When a fourth-grade teacher asked student teacher Aziza Harding to make copies of the worksheets, Harding was stunned to see that it was a "Slavery Word Problems Homework" assignment. The word problems included the questions, "In a slave ship, there can be 3,799 slaves. One day, the slaves took over the ship. 1,897 are dead. How many slaves are alive?" and, "One slave got whipped five times a day. How many times did he get whipped in a month (31 days)? Another slave got whipped nine times a day. How many times did he get whipped in a month? How many times did the two slaves get whipped together in one month?"

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In traditional BuzzFeed fashion, the story is big shareable SHOCK headline in the front, boring and largely unread context that defuses most of the outrage in the back. (I think this common style of controversy-stoking story packaging is "TRASHY" and "EW.")

Here's the relevant bit:

"I want to go to the United States Senate in order to fight for a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United. The whole idea that the Koch brothers, that Karl Rove can say we're coming to Massachusetts, to any state of the union with undisclosed amounts of money is a pollution, which must be changed," Markey said to loud applause.

"The constitution must be amended. The Dred Scott decision had to be repealed, we have to repeal Citizens United," he added.

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In a major step forward, Mississippi banned slavery this week. This type of definite legislative action is ostensibly the type of thing to be excited about in an era of unprecedented political foot-dragging, so congratulations Mississippi for finally ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment. Sure, the state is a little behind the curve on this one, given that the nation is a full 148 years past the official end of slavery (more on that, in a second). But Mississippi isn’t the only state that took awhile to warm up to the idea that people shouldn't own, sell, beat and rape other people in a nation that is largely (and perhaps falsely) recognized as one of the most civilized in the world.

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Indentured servitude or contract labor, like slavery, is a form of unfree labor. Unfortunately, the U.S., having abolished slavery, still has pockets of indentured servant labor. Whether relatively well-paid, like many highly educated H-1B workers, or poorly paid, like many H-2A agricultural workers, indentured servants are, in effect, indentured serfs. Because their presence in the U.S. is dependent on their employment by a particular employer, they cannot quit and are motivated to appease their employer, no matter how brutally they are exploited. If they protest maltreatment, they can be fired and forced to return to their home countries.

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So naturally the GOP would host lawmakers eager to learn about "successful communication with minorities and women" in a room named for those plantations.

Naturally.

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"It coheres, in some ways, very well, and, in some ways, not so well," says Bruce Levine, a historian from the University of Illinois who just published the well-received Civil War history "The Fall of the House of Dixie." "I give them a mixed review."

The film's focus on a narrow period of history — from after the 1864 election to Abraham Lincoln's assassination — necessarily overemphasizes Lincoln's role in ending an institution that was nearing its death, said Levine. "There are fundamental gaps in 'Lincoln.' Watching the film, you don't know that by the time of the events described, slavery is already badly undermined — slaves have been running away from their masters in border states and Confederate states even before fighting began."

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If only it had been so. What an affluent slaveowner like Stephens feared most, no doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its culture.

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That is a possibility which angers some, frightens others and disgusts a few more, saying as much or more about the sorry state of movie audiences today and the still-closed world of big-time filmmaking than any tart provocation Tarantino has managed to splash on the screen.

The reason we’re having this conversation — again — is thanks to the latest addictive confection of revenge film, spaghetti Western, Blaxploitation movie and anti-slavery fantasy Q.T. dropped on us all to close out 2012: "Django Unchained."

Beyond the fact that it is gleefully bloody, luxuriating in crimson-splattered shootouts at a time when America is deeply conflicted over how much it loves this stuff, "Django Unchained" uncorks the perfect revenge fantasy for black people descended from slaves and living in a still-white-dominated society.

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Neither Obama nor Mitt Romney is foolish enough to compare himself directly to Lincoln, but whichever man is elected on Tuesday faces a political landscape nearly as divided and poisonous as the one confronted by the 16th president. Moreover, this year’s election will vividly illustrate that the schisms of the Civil War – over differing visions of justice and equality, competing ideas about states’ rights and federal power, cultural divisions between North and South – have yet to heal, long after the passage of many generations and enormous waves of demographic change ought to have rendered them irrelevant. I have no doubt about which candidate Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner believe comes closer to the Lincolnian ideal, but their remarkable film “Lincoln” offers urgent lessons to both candidates, and the rest of us, about how to wield political power in times of crisis. Whether those lessons still pertain in the dysfunctional climate of the 21st century is another matter.

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