by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence — A Hidden Attic, a Public Book, and a System Indicted

Edenton, 1825. An eleven-year-old girl handed to a doctor by codicil. By fifteen, his demands. By twenty, two children he could sell. By twenty-two, a crawlspace nine feet by seven feet by three feet at the peak, where she would live for seven years to keep him from her son and daughter. She did not stop there. Nineteen years after she got out, she put the story into public print under a thin pseudonym in a country where the Fugitive Slave Act still ran. Frederick Douglass wrote a slave narrative the nation learned to assign in schools. Harriet Jacobs wrote a slave narrative the nation forgot until 1973, and did not fully credit to her until 1987. She named the sexual coercion, the maternal terror, and the Northern complicity that earlier slave narratives had stepped around. Harriet Jacobs needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – He Wrote in Arabic So the Record Couldn’t Erase Him

A Muslim scholar from Senegal. Twenty-five years studying the Qur’an in Arabic. Captured at thirty-seven on the last legal slave ship to Charleston. A month-long run from a South Carolina rice planter. A jail cell in Fayetteville with a fireplace and a piece of coal. He covered the walls with Arabic. He kept writing for fifty-six years — letters, prayers, an autobiography, eighteen surviving manuscripts in a language nobody around him could read. His enslavers said he had become a contented Christian. Newspapers wrote his obituary as a model convert. The 1925 Harvard-trained editor who first published his autobiography wanted to cut the chapter of the Qur’an Omar had placed at the front, deeming it not autobiographical. He missed what the writer had done. Omar ibn Said wrote the only Arabic autobiography by an enslaved person in American history, framed it with the Qur’anic chapter on God’s exclusive Sovereignty over human beings, and laid down a record his captors could not read and history could not erase. Omar ibn Said needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Man in the Reading Room – Part II – After the Diagnosis

The first essay, The Man in the Reading Room – Will He Be Right Again – traced the American economy from 1900 to 2026 and ended with a question. Whether a free people will choose, again, to govern the economic forces in its midst.

This essay names the levers.

Three principal ones — a modern Glass-Steagall, a structural antitrust standard, Wagner-Act protections extended to contingent work — and two supporting ones. Each is laid out with the historical statute that originally embodied it, what it would do, what it would cost, and what is most often argued against it.
The exercise is not advocacy. It is the kind of orderly description a writer can produce when he believes the citizens he is writing for are capable of weighing the evidence themselves.
The patterns are visible. The data is on the table. The levers are named.
The rest is yours

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – He Turned Survival into Evidence

Kidnapped at eleven. Sold four times. Marched six months to the African coast. Loaded onto a slave ship with two hundred and forty-four others. Survived the Middle Passage. Survived the Seven Years’ War. At twenty-one, he placed forty pounds on a Quaker merchant’s table in Montserrat and walked out a free man. Then he kept the receipt. Twenty-three years later, he printed it inside a book — and dedicated the book to Parliament. The slave traders are remembered as ledgers. The boy from Essaka who built a legal case in the form of his own life is barely remembered at all. He turned a manumission certificate into evidence and a memoir into a brief — and helped end the British slave trade ten years after his death. Olaudah Equiano needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Man in the Reading Room – Will He Be Right Again?

In 1916, the top one percent of American households held 45 percent of the nation’s wealth. By 1978, after four decades of New Deal regulation, antitrust enforcement, and a strong labor movement, that figure had fallen to about 22 percent. By 2025, it had climbed back to 31.7 percent — within striking distance of where it stood in 1916. This essay traces the American economy across one hundred and twenty-six years: the trust era, the Crash, the Depression, the New Deal, the postwar Great Compression, the deregulation that followed, and the present moment of platform monopolies and gig labor. The patterns are striking. They were also predicted — by an unexpected observer, working in the Reading Room of the British Museum in the 1860s, with no knowledge of America at all.

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