Before 13th

A gorgeous full-color graphic historical novel, sure to become an instant classic, that explores the friendship and feud between Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, offering new insights into slavery and incarceration in the United States.

Told from the perspectives of statesman and orator Frederick Douglass, and journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, Before 13th is a story that illuminates the contradictions of freedom. Friends and rivals, Douglass and Wells clashed over how to grapple with the racism and exoticism that defined portrayals of African Americans at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where Douglass was invited to speak after they had initially agreed to boycott the event. It uses the story of this real-life conflict as a lens through which we see the history of slavery and incarceration as never before.

Historical anthropologist Michael Ralph joins forces with acclaimed illustrator Laura Molnar to reimagine these two influential Black Americans and the controversies surrounding the Thirteenth Amendment—which some contend did not abolish slavery, claiming instead it was used to keep African Americans in a condition approximating bondage in the years immediately following Emancipation. Before 13th boldly takes on this issue, offering a provocative re-thinking that goes back years earlier than the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, to a practice known as convict leasing, an experiment in capitalist innovation and progressive legal reform, whose profound effects continue to be felt today.

Before 13th features100 four color illustrations.

"In Before 13th, Michael Ralph delivers a groundbreaking reexamination of the origins of convict leasing. Ralph's painstaking research uncovers the roots of this exploitative system in Kentucky's antebellum penitentiaries, reshaping our understanding of how racialized labor practices evolved long before the 13th Amendment's infamous exception clause...This necessary book is more than just a history lesson: it's a visceral, urgent call to confront the ongoing legacies of racial injustice." -- Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America

"Michael Ralph's graphic novel Before 13th is a testament to the power of public history to move us and revise our understanding of the past... I found the book both engaging on the narrative level and groundbreaking in terms of its scholarly intervention. The history Ralph recounts is an important reminder that penal 'reform' is the process by which the carceral state expands." -- Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism

"This book challenges the common assumption that convict leasing emerged only after emancipation, revealing its antebellum origins in an agricultural prison labor system at the state penitentiary in Kentucky. Told through the perspectives of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, Before 13th conveys its original and essential research as a graphic narrative that imbues history with imagination." -- Bryan Wagner, author of Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery

Michael Ralph is Chair and Professor of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He also teaches in the New York University School of Medicine. Michael's research integrates medical anthropology, finance, and politics through an explicit focus on algorithms, actuarial science, forensics, debt, slavery, and incarceration. He lives in Washington, DC.

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