Details:
At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum.
Source:
The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?
In the Year 1807 "Freed Muslim Remains in America" - Yarrow Marmout, an African slave of the Muslim faith, was set free in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood, where he lived for the
rest of his life. Marmout was an early shareholder in the Columbia
bank, which is the second chartered bank in the U.S. Today portraits
of Marmout hang in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the
Georgetown Public Library. In 1927, nearly 175 years after his arrival
to the U.S. as a slave, a descendant of his daughter-in-law's family,
Robert Turner Ford, graduated from Harvard University.