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Introduction
For more than seventy-five years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, thousands of blacks were systematically forced to work against their will. While the methods of forced labor took on many forms over those eight decades — peonage, sharecropping, convict leasing, and chain gangs — the end result was a system that deprived thousands of citizens of their happiness, health,and liberty, and sometimes even their lives.

Though forced labor occurred across the nation, its greatest concentration was in the South, and its victims were disproportionately black and poor. Ostensibly developed in response to penal, economic, or labor problems, forced labor was tightly bound to political, cultural, and social systems of racial oppression.

Convict Leasing
Initially, to save money on prison construction and later to actually generate revenue, Southern states and counties began leasing “convicts” to commercial enterprises. Within a few years states realized they could lease out their convicts to local planters or industrialists who would pay minimal rates for the workers and be responsible for their housing and feeding, thereby eliminating costs and increasing
revenue. Soon, markets for convict laborers developed, with entrepreneurs buying and selling convict labor leases. From county courthouses and jails, men were leased to local plantations, lumber camps, factories and railroads. The convict lease system became highly profitable for the states.

To employers and industrialists, these men represented cheap, disposable labor. The costs to lease a laborer were minimal, and the cost of providing housing, food, clothing and medical treatment could be kept low. Replacement costs were cheap. Unlike in slavery, there was no incentive to treat a laborer well. (Slaves were expensive to purchase, but might create new profit by having children who became more slaves, and could live with a family for generations.)

But for victims and all Southern blacks, convict leasing was a horror. Prisoners were often transferred far from their homes and families. The paperwork and debt record of individual prisoners was often lost, and the men were unable to prove they had paid their debts — and were otherwise assumed they hadn’t. Working conditions at the convict leasing sites were often terrible: illness, lack of proper food, clothing, or
shelter as well as cruel punishments, torture and even death.

Though the profits from convict leasing brought funds to the states’ coffers, the public (both Southerners and Northerners) became uncomfortable with the practice of convict leasing. As part of a series of reforms, Alabama created an office of prison inspector to oversee conditions for convict laborers. The inspectors described wretched conditions for convict laborers. New rules for leasing began to require
minimum standards for treatment and rules for punishments. These reforms brought only modest improvements.

Another way that blacks were forced into labor was through a system known as “peonage.” Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, was a system where an employer compelled a worker to pay off a debt with work. Peonage had been in use in New Mexico Territory before the Civil War. Although Congress deemed that peonage was illegal in the Anti-Peonage Law of 1867, the practice began to flourish
in the South after Reconstruction.

A loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment that declared involuntary servitude illegal “except as a punishment for crime” was used to ensnare blacks into peonage.

In many cases, defendants were found guilty of real or fabricated crimes and were fined for both the crime and additional court fees. When the men were unable to pay, a local businessman would step forward to pay the fines. The convict would then sign a contract agreeing to work for him without pay until the debt was paid off.

A second method involved a defendant who, when faced with the likelihood of a conviction and the threat of being sent to a far-off work camp, would “confess judgment,” essentially claiming responsibility before any trial occurred. A local businessman would step forward to act as “surety,” vouching for the future good behavior of the defendant, and forfeiting a bond that would pay for the crime. The
judge would accept the bond, without ever rendering a verdict on the crime. The defendant would then sign a contract agreeing to work without pay until the surety bond was paid off.

In other cases, workers became indebted to planters (through sharecropping), merchants (through credit) or company stores (through living expenses). Workers were often unable to re-pay the debt, and found themselves in a continuous work-without-pay cycle. Often struck in remote company towns or isolated plantations, workers were prevented from attempting escape by chains, cells, guards, dogs and
violence. If they did attempt to flee their workplace or the spurious debt, they risked a very high chance of being picked up, found guilty of abandoning their debts, fined court fees, and eventually returned to the same employer — or worse, “leased” to a convict mine.

There was little interest in prosecuting the employers who abused their forced laborers: the employers were rich, white, and often politically connected. Worse, many of the laborers had “agreed” to their unfair treatment when they had signed the contracts agreeing to work off their debt. Most were unable to read. Sometimes, the contracts stated that the men agreed to be locked up, to be physically punished,
and that any expenses due to health care, new clothing, or re-capturing due to an escape attempt could be added to the total.

The Final Chapter of Forced Labor
Across the South, new technologies and shifting economic patterns decreased peonage. The dust bowl and Great Depression shifted many sharecroppers off their land. After Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, he instituted his “New Deal,” a series of economic programs intended to offer relief to the unemployed and recovery of the national economy. Though blacks were not the intended audience for these programs, they benefited as many citizens did. Labor laws that
encouraged union organization and defined a minimum wage also supported black workers. However, peonage remained — generally hidden in the rural counties of Southern states. In 1940, with the help of the International Labor Defense (ILD), a group of people in New York and Chicago organized the Abolish Peonage Committee and began to pressure the Justice Department to try cases.

In 1941, in response to the outbreak of World War II and amid fears that racial inequalities would be used as anti–United States propaganda, Attorney General Francis Biddle issued Circular No. 3591 to all federal prosecutors, instructing them to actively investigate and try more peonage cases. Finally, the federal government was willing to act aggressively to protect all its citizens from this forced labor.

For those posters on this board who are obsessed with the evils of "urban" culture (see: code words), and who lament that this culture and democratic policies have deliberately created a culture of dependence that its adherents have little motivation to change, I would like them to remember that slavery ended in 1940. That is just one generation hence.

The current generation of African Americans, particularly in the south, live lives still impacted by slavery. It takes a long time for a group of people to recover from deliberate economic oppression. Children are dependent on the economic strength of their parents to obtain decent educations, which is crucial for future economic strength for all except the very wealthy, for whose children education doesn't really matter. When your parents and grandparents were penalized by a system of laws deliberately constructed to keep them impoverished, and were sometimes actually enslaved by those same laws, they were unable to provide the means and contacts by which their children could thrive economically. So the result is cycles of poverty. The "solution" we offer is mindless, demeaning jobs paying minimum wage and no health care.

But, hey, go ahead and pretend that the real problem is "urban culture", and that is just a symptom of laziness and dependence.

beastie wrote:There are some on this board who seem to think that many African Americans have made dependence on government aid a part of their culture, particularly the "urban" culture. (see: code words) These posters seem to think that there is no other reason for the disproportionate numbers of African Americans receiving government aid. These posters like to ignore very recent history, and the impact that history has had on even today's generation.

One of the more disgusting parts of our recent history was recently discussed on a moving PBS special, "Slavery by Another Name." I'm going to quote sections of the historical background of that special.

http://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-anoth ... _Final.pdf

Introduction
For more than seventy-five years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, thousands of blacks were systematically forced to work against their will. While the methods of forced labor took on many forms over those eight decades — peonage, sharecropping, convict leasing, and chain gangs — the end result was a system that deprived thousands of citizens of their happiness, health,and liberty, and sometimes even their lives.

Though forced labor occurred across the nation, its greatest concentration was in the South, and its victims were disproportionately black and poor. Ostensibly developed in response to penal, economic, or labor problems, forced labor was tightly bound to political, cultural, and social systems of racial oppression.

The article then goes on to explain how the civil war and the outlawing of slavery decimated the economic system of the south, which was heavily dependent on cheap human labor. They now had to pay for labor which they received for free in the past (aside from the initial investment in purchasing the slave).

At the same time as the south was learning to deal with this new economic reality, they were also putting into place legal impediments to the economic development of the African American population in their midst. "Black codes" ensured the continued poverty of the black population.

After an initial attempt to actually govern the south and force the south to accept laws protecting and advancing the former slaves, the federal government tired of the fight and abandoned the south to state powers. That is when a new type of slavery was devised.

Convict Leasing
Initially, to save money on prison construction and later to actually generate revenue, Southern states and counties began leasing “convicts” to commercial enterprises. Within a few years states realized they could lease out their convicts to local planters or industrialists who would pay minimal rates for the workers and be responsible for their housing and feeding, thereby eliminating costs and increasing
revenue. Soon, markets for convict laborers developed, with entrepreneurs buying and selling convict labor leases. From county courthouses and jails, men were leased to local plantations, lumber camps, factories and railroads. The convict lease system became highly profitable for the states.

To employers and industrialists, these men represented cheap, disposable labor. The costs to lease a laborer were minimal, and the cost of providing housing, food, clothing and medical treatment could be kept low. Replacement costs were cheap. Unlike in slavery, there was no incentive to treat a laborer well. (Slaves were expensive to purchase, but might create new profit by having children who became more slaves, and could live with a family for generations.)

But for victims and all Southern blacks, convict leasing was a horror. Prisoners were often transferred far from their homes and families. The paperwork and debt record of individual prisoners was often lost, and the men were unable to prove they had paid their debts — and were otherwise assumed they hadn’t. Working conditions at the convict leasing sites were often terrible: illness, lack of proper food, clothing, or
shelter as well as cruel punishments, torture and even death.

Though the profits from convict leasing brought funds to the states’ coffers, the public (both Southerners and Northerners) became uncomfortable with the practice of convict leasing. As part of a series of reforms, Alabama created an office of prison inspector to oversee conditions for convict laborers. The inspectors described wretched conditions for convict laborers. New rules for leasing began to require
minimum standards for treatment and rules for punishments. These reforms brought only modest improvements.

The documentary provided specific examples of how unjust and outrageous this system was. It was under local control, and plantation owners and factory owners would often let the local police know of their needs as far as cheap labor, and then that local police force would go round up African Americans, charge them with crimes, and they would be convicted in kangaroo courts. The result was that they were then enslaved in horrific working conditions, with little resources for help.

Another way that blacks were forced into labor was through a system known as “peonage.” Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, was a system where an employer compelled a worker to pay off a debt with work. Peonage had been in use in New Mexico Territory before the Civil War. Although Congress deemed that peonage was illegal in the Anti-Peonage Law of 1867, the practice began to flourish
in the South after Reconstruction.

A loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment that declared involuntary servitude illegal “except as a punishment for crime” was used to ensnare blacks into peonage.

In many cases, defendants were found guilty of real or fabricated crimes and were fined for both the crime and additional court fees. When the men were unable to pay, a local businessman would step forward to pay the fines. The convict would then sign a contract agreeing to work for him without pay until the debt was paid off.

A second method involved a defendant who, when faced with the likelihood of a conviction and the threat of being sent to a far-off work camp, would “confess judgment,” essentially claiming responsibility before any trial occurred. A local businessman would step forward to act as “surety,” vouching for the future good behavior of the defendant, and forfeiting a bond that would pay for the crime. The
judge would accept the bond, without ever rendering a verdict on the crime. The defendant would then sign a contract agreeing to work without pay until the surety bond was paid off.

In other cases, workers became indebted to planters (through sharecropping), merchants (through credit) or company stores (through living expenses). Workers were often unable to re-pay the debt, and found themselves in a continuous work-without-pay cycle. Often struck in remote company towns or isolated plantations, workers were prevented from attempting escape by chains, cells, guards, dogs and
violence. If they did attempt to flee their workplace or the spurious debt, they risked a very high chance of being picked up, found guilty of abandoning their debts, fined court fees, and eventually returned to the same employer — or worse, “leased” to a convict mine.

There was little interest in prosecuting the employers who abused their forced laborers: the employers were rich, white, and often politically connected. Worse, many of the laborers had “agreed” to their unfair treatment when they had signed the contracts agreeing to work off their debt. Most were unable to read. Sometimes, the contracts stated that the men agreed to be locked up, to be physically punished,
and that any expenses due to health care, new clothing, or re-capturing due to an escape attempt could be added to the total.

Unbelievably, this system of enslavement and forced labor was not stopped until 1940.

The Final Chapter of Forced Labor
Across the South, new technologies and shifting economic patterns decreased peonage. The dust bowl and Great Depression shifted many sharecroppers off their land. After Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, he instituted his “New Deal,” a series of economic programs intended to offer relief to the unemployed and recovery of the national economy. Though blacks were not the intended audience for these programs, they benefited as many citizens did. Labor laws that
encouraged union organization and defined a minimum wage also supported black workers. However, peonage remained — generally hidden in the rural counties of Southern states. In 1940, with the help of the International Labor Defense (ILD), a group of people in New York and Chicago organized the Abolish Peonage Committee and began to pressure the Justice Department to try cases.

In 1941, in response to the outbreak of World War II and amid fears that racial inequalities would be used as anti–United States propaganda, Attorney General Francis Biddle issued Circular No. 3591 to all federal prosecutors, instructing them to actively investigate and try more peonage cases. Finally, the federal government was willing to act aggressively to protect all its citizens from this forced labor.

For those posters on this board who are obsessed with the evils of "urban" culture (see: code words), and who lament that this culture and democratic policies have deliberately created a culture of dependence that its adherents have little motivation to change, I would like them to remember that slavery ended in 1940. That is just one generation hence.

The current generation of African Americans, particularly in the south, live lives still impacted by slavery. It takes a long time for a group of people to recover from deliberate economic oppression. Children are dependent on the economic strength of their parents to obtain decent educations, which is crucial for future economic strength for all except the very wealthy, for whose children education doesn't really matter. When your parents and grandparents were penalized by a system of laws deliberately constructed to keep them impoverished, and were sometimes actually enslaved by those same laws, they were unable to provide the means and contacts by which their children could thrive economically. So the result is cycles of poverty. The "solution" we offer is mindless, demeaning jobs paying minimum wage and no health care.

But, hey, go ahead and pretend that the real problem is "urban culture", and that is just a symptom of laziness and dependence.

cinepro wrote:
I'm not particularly obsessed with "urban culture", but your post raises the question of what is the best way for the situation to improve?

For example, if you look at the "culture" of some asian communities (some of which have also faced intense discrimination, though obviously not the centuries worth endured by black americans), they seem to have avoided some of the worst of the effects of such discrimination and even prospered in spite of it. What changes need to be made in the "urban culture", and how can those changes be made?

Droopy wrote:This is among the grossest, ideology-driven examples of tendentious revisionist sophistry I've ever seen in print, here or anywhere else. Only the likes of a Derrick Bell, Manning Marable, or Cornell West could stomach such intellectually vacuous dreck with anything approaching a straight face.

This is, however, an excellent example of how a bound and determined ideologue, impervious to both logical thought and empirical evidence, can construct an entire edifice of fairy dust on nothing more than an emotional commitment to their own moral self-adulation while ignoring a mountain of evidence and fact that cuts their entire thesis off at the knees.

This was a tiny magnum opus of fluff that serious social scientists like Thomas Sowell have been dismantling for decades with both hands tied behind their backs.

Not even a nice try.

beastie wrote:

cinepro wrote:
I'm not particularly obsessed with "urban culture", but your post raises the question of what is the best way for the situation to improve?

For example, if you look at the "culture" of some asian communities (some of which have also faced intense discrimination, though obviously not the centuries worth endured by black americans), they seem to have avoided some of the worst of the effects of such discrimination and even prospered in spite of it. What changes need to be made in the "urban culture", and how can those changes be made?

I don't think there is an easy answer, and certainly didn't mean to imply there is one.

Personally, I think early childhood intervention is crucial. I'm not talking about headstart - I'm talking about neighborhood centers with various forms of support. By the time economically deprived children enter kindergarten, they're often already behind their peers.

beastie wrote:
Feel free to demonstrate, with reliable sources, exactly what is false in the report.

Droopy wrote:



Of course, the actual answer to this is not ""neighborhood centers" or the laughable failure known as Headstart, but married, intact, two-parent families who stay together and raise, love, discipline, and socialize their children together.

But this would never, under any circumstances whatsoever, enter Beastie's head, nor any leftist like her.

Its occurred to me that worship of the state is very much like pornography, only in this case its a voyeuristic experience of one's own hubris projected upon institutions of power through which one lives out one's own fantasies of control and human engineering.

Droopy wrote:

beastie wrote:
Feel free to demonstrate, with reliable sources, exactly what is false in the report.

Certainly, Beastie, after you demonstrate, from reliable sources, why I should believe that this PBS documentary is any different that a thousand other PBS documentaries I grew up watching: a tendentious fauxumentary synthesizing actual empirical events and historical data with wild, ideologically-driven leaps of logic and interpretation, powerful psychological and emotional manipulation (through a combination of actual historical evidence, moving, emotionally stirring music, and striking visual imagery) and linguistic head-gaming (your claim, from the evidence cited, that "slavery" didn't end in America until 1940 is a logical and conceptual whopper of audacious proportions, but precisely what the Left must continually deploy in its relentless quest to take ideological control of history and language).

Without the Republican Party, there would not have been a Civil Rights Act of 1964, period, end of story, end of discussion, end of history lesson.

Here it is yet again, shaken, not stirred: The contemporary Left is the only remaining organized political, social, and ideological opposition, of any significant consequence, to race neutral, color/ethnicity blind relations between the races in all facets of American life, save for one other sociocultural element, that being the peculiar body of faux academic disciplines that fall under the rubric of "multiculturalism," of which the traditional black power movement is an integral part.

Peonage
Notwithstanding its early acknowledgment in the Slaughter-House Cases that peonage was comprehended within the slavery and involuntary servitude proscribed by the Thirteenth Amendment,24 the Court has had frequent occasion to determine whether state legislation or the conduct of individuals has contributed to reestablishment of that prohibited status. Defined as a condition of enforced servitude by which the servitor is compelled to labor against his will in liquidation of some debt or obligation, either real or pretended, peonage was found to have been unconstitutionally sanctioned by an Alabama statute, directed at defaulting sharecroppers, which imposed a criminal liability and subjected to imprisonment farm workers or tenants who abandoned their employment, breached their contracts, and exercised their legal right to enter into employment of a similar nature with another person. The clear purpose of such a statute was declared to be the coercion of payment, by means of criminal proceedings, of a purely civil liability arising from breach of contract.25
24 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36 (1873).
25 Peonage Cases, 123 F. 671 (M.D. Ala. 1903).
Several years later, in Bailey v. Alabama,26 the Court voided another Alabama statute which made the refusal without just cause to perform the labor called for in a written contract of employment, or to refund the money or pay for the property advanced thereunder, prima facie evidence of an intent to defraud, and punishable as a criminal offense, and which was enforced subject to a local rule of evidence which prevented the accused, for the purpose of rebutting the statutory presumption, from testifying as to his "uncommunicated motives, purpose, or intention." Inasmuch as a state "may not compel one man to labor for another in payment of a debt by punishing him as a criminal if he does not perform the service or pay the debt," the Court refused to permit it "to accomplish the same result [indirectly] by creating a statutory presumption which, upon proof of no other fact, exposes him to conviction."27
In 1914, in United States v. Reynolds,28 a third Alabama enactment was condemned as conducive to peonage through the permission it accorded to persons, fined upon conviction for a misdemeanor, to confess judgment with a surety in the amount of the fine and costs, and then to agree with said surety, in consideration of the latter's payment of the confessed judgment, to reimburse him by working for him upon terms approved by the court, which, the Court pointed out, might prove more onerous than if the convict had been sentenced to imprisonment at hard labor in the first place. Fulfillment of such a contract with the surety was viewed as being virtually coerced by the constant fear it induced of rearrest, a new prosecution, and a new fine for breach of contract, which new penalty the convicted person might undertake to liquidate in a similar manner attended by similar consequences.
Bailey v. Alabama was followed in Taylor v. Georgia29 and Pol-lock v. Williams,30 in which statutes of Georgia and Florida, not materially different from that voided in the Bailey case, were found to be unconstitutional. Although the Georgia statute prohibited the defendant from testifying under oath, it did not prevent him from entering an unsworn denial both of the contract and of the receipt of any cash advancement thereunder, a factor which, the Court emphasized, was no more controlling than the customary rule of evidence in Bailey. In the Florida case, notwithstanding the fact that the defendant pleaded guilty and accordingly obviated the necessity of applying the prima facie presumption provision, the Court reached an identical result, chiefly on the ground that the presumption provision, despite its nonapplication, "had a coercive effect in producing the plea of guilty."
26 219 U.S. 219 (1911). Justice Holmes, joined by Justice Lurton, dissented on the ground that a State was not forbidden by this Amendment from punishing a breach of contract as a crime. "Compulsory work for no private master in a jail is not peonage." Id. at 247.
27 219 U.S. at 244.
28 235 U.S. 133 (1914).
29 315 U.S. 25 (1942).
30 322 U.S. 4 (1944). Justice Reed, with Chief Justice Stone concurring, contended in a dissenting opinion that a State is not prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment from "punishing the fraudulent procurement of an advance in wages." Id. at 27.
Pursuant to its section 2 enforcement powers, Congress enacted a statute by which it abolished peonage and prohibited anyone from holding, arresting, or returning, or causing or aiding in the arresting or returning, of a person to peonage.31
The Court looked to the meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment in interpreting two enforcement statutes, one prohibiting conspiracy to interfere with exercise or enjoyment of constitutional rights,32 the other prohibiting the holding of a person in a condition of involuntary servitude.33 For purposes of prosecution under these authorities, the Court held, "the term 'involuntary servitude' necessarily means a condition of servitude in which the victim is forced to work for the defendant by the use or threat of physical restraint or physical injury, or by the use or threat of coercion through law or the legal process."34
31 Ch. 187, § 1, 14 Stat. 546, now in 42 U.S.C. § 1994 and 18 U.S.C. § 1581. Upheld in Clyatt v. United States, 197 U.S. 207 (1905); and see United States v. Gaskin, 320 U.S. 527 (1944). See also 18 U.S.C. § 1584, which is a merger of 3 Stat. 452 (1818), and 18 Stat. 251 (1874), dealing with involuntary servitude. Cf. United States v. Shackney, 333 F.2d 475, 481-83 (2d Cir. 1964).
32 18 U.S.C. § 241.
33 18 U.S.C. § 1584.
34 United States v. Kozminski, 487 U.S. 931 (1988). Compulsion of servitude through "psychological coercion," the Court ruled, is not prohibited by these statutes.
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