Genealogist and television producer Antoinette Harrell has spent the last ten years documenting slavery in the American South. But she's not studying the pre-Civil War, legal ownership of human beings type slavery of the 19th century. She's studying the peonage and debt bondage-based slavery of the 20th and 21st centuries, which according to her findings is often directly traceable back to pre-Civil war slavery. In many ways, the two models of slavery look the same: poor African-Americans working land owned by Caucasians to whom they are tied through generations of exploitation. In other ways, the models are quite different: instead of legal ownership preventing these workers from striking out on their own, it's isolation, debt, fear, and the inertia of a family history of being beaten down and abused.

“Slavery never ended and that's the point, it never ended. It just disguised itself in other forms,” says Antoinette Harrell.

And she's right. For example, Mae Miller, a native of Mississippi and Louisiana, was a slave for most of her life. Her family was moved from plantation to plantation at the behest of the White owners, where they were beaten and fed scraps from the table. Her family never spoke of the world outside these few rural plantations, never indicated their might be a life for them outside slavery. Miller and her family were kept in this way, as illegal slaves, until 2001. She says she still knows several who live like she did, fearful to make an escape.

Slavery was outlawed in the U.S. in 1865. Please ask Mississippi to end it in practice today.