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One of the systems of labor that would emerge in the reconstruction era that immediately
undermined the 13th Amendment was sharecropping. It was a system in which former slaves worked
a plot of a plantation in exchange for a share of the proceeds. It had certain advantages
in that there was no direct supervision of overseers, the sharecroppers work on their
own terms, and they were able to work as families as opposed to gangs of slaves. In theory,
it was advantageous in that the former slaves had every incentive to make the plot productive
as they now had a direct investment. In practice however, sharecroppers tended
to be subjected to extreme exploitation. Oftentimes the terms of the contract required that the
sharecroppers sell their harvest directly to the landowner. Of course, the land owner
set the price and it was generally set artificially low. Additionally, the contract required sharecroppers
to purchase seeds, tools, groceries, and provisions from the plantation store. As sharecroppers
only saw money once a year – at harvest – all provisions were bought on credit.
Again, the plantation owner set the price which was set artificially high. As a result,
at the end of the harvest sharecroppers often found that their share did not amount to the
debts they had incurred throughout the year, and sharecropping families often found themselves
in debt. That meant that they were bound to service for an additional year to pay off
the debt. It was a revolving door of debt peonage, there are reports of some families
being bound to these sharecropping plantations into the 1980s. In other words, former slaves
were bound to service and a system of labor that looked like, felt like, and smelled very
much like slavery. Why didn’t former slaves simply refuse to
sign the contracts? As the confederate states rejoined the union they were required to redraft
their state constitutions acknowledging the 13th Amendment. In doing so, however, beginning
with the Mississippi the former confederate states included an additional set of laws
directed specifically at blacks and intended to strip them of any semblance of equal protection.
While the black codes contained some rights that slaves did not formally have—the right
to marry, sign contracts, buy property, sue, and testify in court – they also imposed
severe restrictions. African Americans who were not under labor contract were considered
vagrants and subject to imprisonment. Thus, they were forced to sign the very exploitive
labor contracts. In addition, emancipated blacks were incarcerated for any number of
reasons ranging from cruelty animals to such vaguely defined offenses as mischief. Additionally,
as Angela Davis writes in her book, Women Race And Class, black women were subject to
arrest as well as black man, but just as black women experienced slavery in ways that men
would never come to know, black women endured the hardships of emancipation in ways specific
to their gender as well. For Black women, exploitative labor contracts included not
just sharecropping, but domestic service. What that meant was that black women were
on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week compensated oftentimes only with room and
board. In other words, Black women who were "emancipated" laboring as domestic servants
were alsovulnerable to *** assault just as they had been in slavery.
As Mississippi jails began to fill with former slaves, Mississippi State Penitentiary’s
Parchman Farm paved the way for the convict lease system. The state legislature passed
an act to provide for the leasing of convict labor for the state. It declared that all
prisoners may work outside of penitentiary in building railroads levees or in any private
labor for employment. While the act provided that all prisoners
may work outside the penitentiary, a penitentiary report of 1871 makes it clear that convict
labor was intended to be exclusive to blacks. The report indicates that 146 colored males
and six colored females were shipped to the Yazoo Delta. While not a single white inmate
was shipped to the delta, 61 white males and 25 black males who were elderly and/or disabled
remained at the penitentiary. Flying in the face of the fourteenth amendment –which
was supposed to provide equal protection under the law –African Americans by the end of
the reconstruction era found themselves subject to a separate and unequal justice system.
In a July 11, 2008 segment that aired on Democracy Now!, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez,
Douglass Blackmon shows how Jim Crow justice became a widespread phenomenon throughout
the south. JUAN GONZALEZ: We now turn back in time to one of the ugliest
chapters in American history: slavery. Most people think that this shameful chapter was
closed with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and with even more finality in 1865
with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that banned slavery.
But a new book by Douglas Blackmon uncovers the forgotten history of neo-slavery imposed
The book is called Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America
from the Civil War to World War II. Author Douglas Blackmon is an award-winning journalist,
also the bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta. He joins us now from Atlanta.
Welcome to Democracy Now! DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thanks for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Why Slavery by Another Name? Why that title? DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Because this was slavery, even though
we didn’t call it that. The legal institution of slavery, the legal concept of slavery that
had existed before 1865, had in fact been abolished, and there weren’t laws on the
books anymore that authorized slavery, and you couldn’t file a deed on a slave down
at the county courthouse anymore. But the reality was that in the years after the Civil
War, all of the Southern states passed this array of new laws, which were specifically
designed to intimidate African Americans out of the political process, to inhibit their
ability to have economic success, and eventually to force first thousands, and then eventually
hundreds of thousands, of African Americans back into a form of involuntary servitude.
And it wasn’t called slavery, but it was slavery by another name.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you’ve gone back into county records in areas across the South to unearth this
story. Tell us about how the mechanisms actually worked, especially places like Alabama and
Georgia, how they — and also, where were these victims enslaved into? What were the
areas that they worked in? DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, a lot of conventional history that’s
been written about this period of time acknowledged that there was this abusive system of county
sheriffs and county judges and the state courts leasing prisoners, people who had been convicted
of crimes, leasing them out to — as a way of paying off their fines, leasing them to
commercial interests like coal mines and iron ore mines, timber camps, turpentine stills,
where turpentine was made from pine trees, which was an incredibly important commodity
for the whole entire US economy at that time. And that story has been somewhat documented.
But what I did was I went across Alabama and Georgia and Florida and really all of the
Southern states, but I went courthouse by courthouse across key areas of the Deep South
and discovered enormous numbers of records which really hadn’t been looked at in a
hundred years and which made it very clear that among these thousands of people who were
arrested and forced into this form of forced labor, that huge numbers of them had committed
no crimes at all, or they had been arrested and convicted on the most frivolous charges,
like vagrancy or the inability to prove that they had a job at any time, which was something
that almost no one could do in an era without pay stubs.
It was against the law in the South for a farm worker to change jobs, to move from one
landowner to another landowner without the permission of the first landowner. Now, that
law didn’t say it would only be applied to African Americans, but overwhelmingly it
only was enforced against African Americans, with the specific purpose of making it impossible
for huge numbers of black people to have any kind of economic mobility or to break free
from this life of de facto slavery. And that was happening in a pervasive way in every
Southern state by the beginning of the twentieth century. ...
JUAN GONZALEZ: And how was it — for instance, if someone
was arrested on a vagrancy charge, you would assume that this would only be a very short
sentence. How were they able to be then impressed into service for these companies for longer
periods of time? DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, take, for instance, the example
of a man named Green Cottenham, around whom I built much of the narrative of the book.
Green Cottenham was a child of former slaves who was born in the 1880s in the center of
Alabama. And by the time he had reached adulthood, just after the turn-of-the-century, this whole
new system of intimidation, really terror in many respects, had come into place against
African Americans across the South. And he was arrested in the spring of 1908,
when a deputy sheriff in Columbiana, Alabama went out on a sweep, effectively, to round
up a number of African American men, because a few days later, the man from the US Steel
mine, who came by periodically to pick up laborers and take them back to the mines,
would be arriving in a few days. And so, Green Cottenham was swept up. He was standing around
with a number of other African Americans behind the train station in the town. And this group
of men were arrested for no particular reason. By the time they were brought before a judge
two days later, the deputy couldn’t remember exactly what the charge had been, and so the
original charge that’s written down on the day he’s arrested is different from the
one that the judge finally decides to convict him of, which was simply vagrancy. And almost
any farm worker, and certainly any indigent African American man, in 1908 could be charged
with vagrancy, unless he had some powerful white man willing to step forward and say,
“No, he works for me. He’s under my control.” Well, that didn’t happen for Green Cottenham,
and so he is convicted of vagrancy. He was sentenced to a fine of $10 or thereabouts,
but on top of the fines, there would be imposed on these men — in those days, sheriffs and
court clerks and many other government officials received their compensation not in salaries
from the government, but from fees that were charged to the people they arrested and convicted.
And so, in addition to his fine, there was almost $200 of additional fees tacked onto
what he would have to pay to become free. Well, that’s two or three years’ wages
in that era. And that was something that would be impossible for a young man like him to
have produced. And so, to pay off those fines, he was effectively
sold into the control of US Steel Corporation, who would pay back his fines a month at a
time. And this happened to thousands of people, many of whom, even after their fines had been
paid off, were still not released, or the people who were holding them would invent
another offense and make another claim of a spurious crime, have them convicted again
and hold them for an even longer period of time. ...