Enslaved
August 16th, 2008I have just finished reading Slavery By Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon. This is an extraordinary book, and should be required reading for every American citizen.
To put it bluntly, slavery did not end in America until 1945.
Blackmon meticulously researched local, state and federal records, and cross-referenced what he found with newspaper, corporate and private accounts. He presents comprehensive proof of how the Southern states’ system of convict leasing became a legal cloak protecting entrenched practices of intimidation, wrongful accusation, and debt slavery. Individual farmers and corporations alike purchased convict labor - cotton plantations, turpentine farms, logging camps, brick factories, and coal mines. Government at every level - yes, the federal government too - had full knowledge of these practices. And while the system ostensibly applied to black and white alike, it was newly freed African Americans and their descendants who suffered disproportionally under this system.
Here is how the system worked: a black man convicted of a crime (typically drunkenness, violations of racial etiquette, or being unable to provide proof of employment) would be sentenced to hard labor, usually for a period of days, and would also be ordered to pay a fine and fees to the judge, sheriff and any witnesses. If he could not pay the fees (frequently the equivalent of several months’ pay for poor farmers) then labor to pay off that debt would be added on to the original sentence. It was not unusual for someone to be sentenced to 10 days labor for a petty crime and 200 days labor to pay all the fees. Companies or individuals “purchased” the convict’s labor from the state or county by paying the fees and inducing the convict to sign a contract promising to work off the debt. These contracts, presented to illiterate individuals and signed with an “X”, frequently included provisions allowing the owner to lock up the convict at night, prevent his leaving the property, bring him back by force if he left, and to use corporal punishment upon him. With no oversight or regulation, these convicts disappeared into a black hole. Furthermore, arrests rates rose and fell in tandem with the need for cheap labor, e.g during cotton harvests or mine expansions.
The potential for abuse was almost without limit. Conviction did not occur the way we know it today. A sheriff would arrest a man, and bring him before a local justice with no witnesses, evidence or legal representation for the accused (sometimes without even a specific crime). The judge would convict the individual and within 48 hours that person would be on his way to a mine or plantation. Once a convict was in the mine, new trumped up charges could be brought when the original sentence ended - most frequently alleged debts for the food and clothes the convict used during his sentence, or false charges of attempted escape. Without due process, the person would be sentenced to more months of labor. Records were poorly kept, if at all, and a convict’s “contract” could be sold to another company. Men were sold from mine to camp to factory, and many did not emerge.
During antebellum slavery, an owner had a vested interest in safeguarding his human property. Slaves were expensive, and owners were motivated to keep slaves alive and healthy so they could continue to work and retain their value. This did not protect slaves from abuse or brutalization, but there was a general market incentive for slave owners to be moderate. Under the convict leasing system, there was no such incentive at all. If a convict died, another could be found to replace him, and quite cheaply. States and counties applied no penalty to lessees when convicts died in their care. It is well documented that these convicts were kept in filth, and provided insufficient clothing, food and medical care. Wardens and overseers brutalized these men in the interest of labor production targets with no regard for their physical well-being. A convict would be whipped for failing to meet a target or for “insubordination,” and then put back on the line to work. Disease and abuse killed thousands.
How could this happen after the Civil War?
[I]n 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the one federal law forcing whites to comply with the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments - awarding voting and legal rights to blacks - could be enforced only under the most rare circumstances. Civil rights were a local, not federal issue, the court found.
The effect was to open the floodgates for laws throughout the South specifically aimed at eliminating those new rights for former slaves and their descendants . . . In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, the federal government adopted as policy that allegations of continuing slavery were matters whose prosecution should be left to local authorities only - a de facto acceptance that white southerners could do as they wished with the black people in their midst. (p. 93)
There were NO federal investigations of alleged debt slavery until 1903, and even those cases ended with token fines and presidential pardons. Georgia stopped leasing state convicts to corporations in 1909, but continued to enforce hard labor through chain gangs, a system every bit as brutal as the corporate system. Alabama did not make the transition to chain gangs until 1928, and even after that, thousands of men were leased to individual owners through a system of local customs and informal arrangements. In 1927, one out of every nineteen black men over the age of twelve in Alabama was captured in some form of involuntary servitude. (p. 375)
It was not until December 12, 1941 that the US Attorney General issued a directive stating, “In the United States one cannot sell himself as a peon or slave - the law is fixed and established to protect the weak-minded, the poor, the miserable. Men will sometimes sell themselves for a meal of victuals or contract with another who acts as surety on his bond to work out the amount of the bond upon his release from jail. Any such sale or contract is positively null and void and the procuring and causing of such contract to be made violates [the] statutes.” (p. 379)
Why 1941? Blackmon notes that more mechanized methods of mining and farming became widespread throughout the south, and the general cost of labor plunged, combining to make convict leasing much less attractive economically. In addition, Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized that Japanese and Nazi propaganda would cast a harsh light on the reality of black life in America. In order to honestly oppose the racially motivated horrors perpetrated abroad, and in order to secure the necessary participation of blacks as soldiers in the war, the entrenched practices of continued slavery in the United States had to be opposed and eradicated. However, it was not until 1951 that Congress finally passed a law making any form of slavery in the United States a crime.
I am terribly disturbed and angered by this story. This country believes that slavery ended in 1865, that civil rights were fully established in the 1960’s, and discrimination isn’t a big deal so can’t we all move past it already. I know that discrimination is very much a continuing and serious problem, but I was shocked to learn how entrenched slavery remained in this country for almost 80 years after the Civil War. And everyone knew about it. State and local governments, the federal government, corporations in the North and South, and public figures including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and Theodore Roosevelt - everyone knew. And very few individuals tried to do anything to stop it.
I am an educated woman, and I thought I had a strong grasp of American history. I went to law school, and took several courses on civil rights and constitutional law. But I had no idea that any of this ever happened. Other books have been written on the topic; there is court documentation from the few prosecutions that were attempted. This shameful history was not secret, but it may as well have been. How could we not know this? And how can we expect to eradicate discrimination and improve race relations in this country if we do not address what happened?
Blackmon eloquently summarizes:
As painful as it may be to plow the past, among the ephemera left behind by generations crushed in the wheels of American white supremacy are telling explanations for the fissures that still thread our society. In fact, these events explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.
Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn’t end until 1945 - well into the childhoods of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age. The clock must be reset.
Even more plain, no one who reads this book can wonder as to the origins, depth, and visceral foundation of so many African Americans’ fundamental mistrust of our judicial processes.
Most profoundly, the evidence moldering in county courthouses and the National Archives compels us to confront this extinguished past, to recognize the terrible contours of the record, to teach our children the truth of a terror that pervaded much of American life, to celebrate its end, to lift any shame on those who could not evade it. This book is not a call for financial reparations. Instead, I hope it is a formidable plea for a resurrection and fundamental reinterpretation of a tortured chapter in the collective American past.
We should rename this era of American history known as the time of “Jim Crow segregation.” How strange that decades defined in life by abject brutalization came to be identified in history with the image of a largely forgotten white actor’s minstrel performance - a caricature called “Jim Crow.” Imagine if the first years of the Holocaust were known by the name of Germany’s most famous anti-Semitic comedian of the 1930s. Let us define this period of American life plainly and comprehensively. It was the Age of Neoslavery. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery’s grip on U.S. society - its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to millions of black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life. (p. 401-402)
It is my personal opinion, now more than ever, that this nation owes African Americans a deep, genuine and very public apology. Only then can we begin to heal.
Posted in Beliefs | 1 Comment »
