EXCERPT:
KAINE: “And we need to do much more within the criminal justice system but also within all of our systems to dismantle the structures of racism that our federal state and local governments carefully erected and maintained over centuries. We know a little bit about this in Virginia. The first African-Americans into the English colonies came to a Point Comfort, Virginia in 1619. They were slaves. They’d been captured against their will, but they landed in colonies that didn’t have slavery. There were no laws about slavery in the colonies at that time. The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody, we created it. It got created by the Virginia General Assembly and the legislatures of other states. It got created by the court systems in colonial America in sense that enforced fugitive slave laws. It was — we created it. And we created and maintained it over centuries.”