The first abolition movement grew from the late 1700s through the Civil War. Black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth led alongside white allies. They published newspapers like The Liberator, launched in 1831, organized the Underground Railroad and petitioned Congress. Northern states ended slavery gradually, starting with Pennsylvania's 1780 law. Slavery ended nationwide when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865.
That amendment left an exception: slavery and involuntary servitude remained legal as punishment for a crime. Southern states used that clause to force Black people back into unpaid labor through convict leasing.
Modern abolitionists, including the scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore and the group Critical Resistance, founded in 1997, argue that prisons and police repeat that history. Prison abolition seeks to shrink these systems and build alternatives such as housing, health care and community safety programs. Several states have also voted to remove the punishment exception from their constitutions.