Neo Slavery Lasted Until WW2. Could it Happen Again?

File this under things we didn't know.

Those who think slavery died in the Civil War would be wrong.  A form of slavery, every bit as real and deadly as the antebellum kind lasted until FDR forced federal prosecutors in the South to prosecute those who those who used the enforced labor many of whom were big companies.

Here is a Newsweek report on that by a guy who wrote a book on it "Slavery’s Last Chapter ".

Excerpt:

Neoslavery is a term to describe a whole range of ways in which all across the Southern United States in the late 19th century and deep into the 20th century millions of African-Americans found themselves in a form of de facto slavery and involuntary servitude. One part of neoslavery, "convict leasing," was the sentencing of prisoners to hard labor or to fine them outrageously, and [then] they were leased out to commercial interests such as farms, coal mines, turpentine production plants, lumber and railroad camps. This was the means by which the white South forced millions of other African-Americans to go along with de facto slavery that took on the form of sharecropping, abusive farm tenancy, land renting and labor contracts.

...

After the Civil War, all of the Southern states passed a series of laws, which were designed primarily to criminalize black life. For example, vagrancy statues made it a crime for any person to be unable to prove at any given moment that he was employed. Also, in every Southern state it was against the law for African-Americans to sell their crops after dark. The purpose was specifically to ensure that as a sharecropper you could only sell your crops to the landowner.

...

It's impossible to determine the precise numbers, but in Alabama at least 200,000 African-American men were subjected to the most systematic form of neoslavery, the convict-leasing system. There were tens of millions of African-Americans that over this 80-year period either one way or another were forced to live on a farm or in a lumber camp or were forced into convict leasing by the perverted justice system.

 Here's Democracy Now's report  (interview with the author) on the book he's written which goes into the subject more extensively "Slavery by Another Name: Author Douglas Blackmon on the Re-Enslavement of Black People in America " .

...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.

You can read either of the reports to find out how the systemic use of neo slavery was stopped.  (Also Blackmon has a book out that I haven't seen yet.  I guess I'll have to order it.

My summary is that the attack on Pearl Harbor and necessity of bringing allies together led the president to ask aides if there were any way in which Japan could use propaganda about minorities against the US.  When Roosevelt, a New York native, learned about the southern practices he used the power of his office to stop them.

Now we need to look at the way we are constantly voting longer and longer sentences these days for crimes that had much lower ones twenty-thirty years ago, and we know that given similar circumstances minorities get longer sentences and are more likely to spend time in prison than whites.  Work by prisoners is mostly done these days on maintaining prison life (and making license plates for the state), but prisons are beginning to be the place for military recruiters go to work over young men and women psychologically and pick them out of the remains of the life that the justice system left them with, for their wars. 

This being done in an age when we see an almost overt profiling?  A Northern California mayor or police chief said they needed to go check who's under "the dew rags" after residents complaints of an uptick in burglary  problems.  New Jersey admitted a tendency towards profiling about a decade ago.  And profiling is something you just don't admit unless your tongue is very loose.  Like the New Jersey report notes"racial profiling controversy is by no means limited to the New Jersey State Police, but rather is a truly national problem, as reflected in the number of bills pending in Congress and state legislatures across the country."

So you have to wonder whether, the calls we hear to reduce prison costs by farming out the people inside to private companies isn't another growing slide into neo slavery, and one that will again hit minorities hardest.

tags: slavery  racial profiling  fdr  neo slavery  minority rights  prison terms  

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