The Underground Railroad's Aaron Pierre on why the past is never dead

By Marah Eakin | May 18, 2021 | 6:00pm

TV Features Aaron Pierre

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Though slavery officially ended in the United States in the 1860s, its ramifications have been felt ever since, whether through racist Jim Crow legislation, red lining, microaggressions, or just general systematic inequality. That’s why many say it’s important that we keep reliving the horror of slavery to really understand what those effected went through, and why those scars run deep even today.

That’s in part what we talked to The Underground Railroad’s Aaron Pierre about. After all, as William Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” More on that thought, plus Pierre’s reckoning with his native England’s own history of racial oppression can be found in the clip above.