ldsfaqs wrote:The answer is really simple....
The reason the PBS special is poppy-cock is because while most of the "facts" it describes from history are indeed true, it is only true for a very small number of blacks, and in a few areas and places.
It is not reflective AT ALL of the entire or significant portion of the black community, especially as exists across the country. It is cherry picked history painting an entirely false picture.
And FYI, we are not at all ignorant of these facts, we are and have been well aware of this "particular" aspect of history, we simply know more which debunks this "selective" emphasis as it relates to the issue in question.
It’s remarkable that you, and whoever the “we” in your royal we includes, know so much about the numbers involved in peonage and convict-leasing that you are able to authoritatively declare that it involved only a very small number of people. It’s remarkable because even the scholars who have devoted their careers to the study of this subject are unable to provide accurate numbers due to the fact that the practice was tolerated by the states, if not actually sanctioned, and the prosecution of cases often fell to the federal government. It was the worst cases – ones often involving outright murder - that managed to go through the system. So the records we have are the tip of the iceberg, and it’s a mighty big tip.
So I invite you to share your remarkable sources. Perhaps you may want to share them with the scholars in this field, as well. I’m sure they’d be immensely grateful.
In the meantime, I’ll share a bit of what the scholars have ascertained about the practice, while waiting for you to correct them.
Pete Daniels is one of the notable experts in this field. He has helpfully summarized the Justice Department’s records on peonage, and you can access his report here:
http://cisupa.proquest.com/ksc_assets/catalog/10620.pdfI’ll just share a few highlights.
By the time the Supreme Court decided the Clyatt case, there were some hundred cases moving through the courts. In Alabama, U.S. attorneys were busy prosecuting cases from many areas of the state. In 1903, set cases from Coosa and Tallapoosa counties gained national attention as Judge Thomas Goode Jones heard evidence. Most of these cases involved employers, usually wealthy planters, who used corrupt justices of the peace to fine workers and then bail them out to the employers. When a man's term of service expired, the employer relied on these justices to discover another infraction and sentence the man again. Judge Jones thoroughly explored the legal origins of peonage, tracing it to a New Mexico case in the 1850s.4 Ultimately, all of those charged pled guilty and received light sentences.
Note that there were HUNDREDS of cases moving through the courts at that point. HUNDREDS. And these cases most likely were just a fraction of the actual practices, since the feds had to put a lot of time and manpower into these prosecutions, and it was often the worst cases that got any attention at all. It’s like any other crime – the numbers caught and prosecuted don’t reflect how many crimes are actually committed. They only reflect how many were caught.
Note the sentence:
When a man's term of service expired, the employer relied on these justices to discover another infraction and sentence the man again.
One must understand that these men were not really criminals. They were people deliberately caught in a system that was entirely designed to put them to uncompensated labor: ie, slavery. States enacted “Black Codes” that were specifically designed for this purpose.
Here are some details about Black Codes.
The Union victory in the Civil War may have given some 4 million slaves their freedom, but African Americans faced a new onslaught of obstacles and injustices during the Reconstruction era (1865-1877). By late 1865, when the 13th Amendment officially outlawed the institution of slavery, the question of freed blacks' status in the postwar South was still very much unresolved. Under the lenient Reconstruction policies of President Andrew Johnson, white southerners reestablished civil authority in the former Confederate states in 1865 and 1866. They enacted a series of restrictive laws known as "black codes," which were designed to restrict freed blacks' activity and ensure their availability as a labor force now that slavery had been abolished. For instance, many states required blacks to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested as vagrants and fined or forced into unpaid labor. Northern outrage over the black codes helped undermine support for Johnson's policies, and by late 1866 control over Reconstruction had shifted to the more radical wing of the Republican Party in Congress.
http://www.history.com/topics/black-codesIf you had been black and lived in the South during this period, you could easily have been arrested, jailed, and forced into unpaid labor during your stints of unemployment.
Here are some more details:
http://www.crf-usa.org/brown-v-board-50 ... codes.html The state legislatures also began to pass laws limiting the freedom of the former slaves. These laws mirrored those of colonial times, which placed severe restrictions on both slaves and emancipated blacks. Neither of these groups could vote, serve on juries, travel freely, or work in occupations of their choice. Even their marriages were outside the law.
The white legislators saw little reason not to continue the tradition of unequal treatment of black persons. An editorial in the Macon, Georgia, Daily Telegraph reflected the widely held opinion of the white South at this time: “There is such a radical difference in the mental and moral [nature] of the white and black race, that it would be impossible to secure order in a mixed community by the same [law].”
White Southerners also feared that if freedmen did not work for white landowners, the agricultural economy of the South would collapse. During the last months of 1865, a rumor spread among freedmen: The federal government was going to grant “40 acres and a mule” to every ex-slave family on Christmas Day. Although the federal government had confiscated some Confederate lands and given them to freed slaves, it never planned to do this on a massive scale. Nonetheless, expecting their own plots of land, blacks in large numbers refused to sign work contracts with white landowners for the new year. At the same time, Southern whites passed around their own rumor that blacks would rise in rebellion when the free land failed to appear on Christmas Day.
All these economic worries, prejudices, and fears helped produce the first Black Codes of 1865. These codes consisted of special laws that applied only to black persons. The first Black Code, enacted by Mississippi, proved harsh and vindictive. South Carolina followed with a code only slightly less harsh, but more comprehensive in regulating the lives of “persons of color.”
The same site offers examples from South Carolina:
The South Carolina code included a contract form for black “servants” who agreed to work for white “masters.” The form required that the wages and the term of service be in writing. The contract had to be witnessed and then approved by a judge. Other provisions of the code listed the rights and obligations of the servant and master. Black servants had to reside on the employer’s property, remain quiet and orderly, work from sunup to sunset except on Sundays, and not leave the premises or receive visitors without the master’s permission. Masters could “moderately” whip servants under 18 to discipline them. Whipping older servants required a judge’s order. Time lost due to illness would be deducted from the servant’s wages. Servants who quit before the end date of their labor contract forfeited their wages and could be arrested and returned to their masters by a judge’s order. On the other hand, the law protected black servants from being forced to do “unreasonable” tasks.
So if a black person left the employer’s property without permission, that person could be arrested, jailed, and forced into unpaid labor.
All Southern Black Codes relied on vagrancy laws to pressure freedmen to sign labor contracts. South Carolina’s code did not limit these laws to unemployed persons, but included others such as peddlers and gamblers. The code provided that vagrants could be arrested and imprisoned at hard labor. But the county sheriff could “hire out” black vagrants to a white employer to work off their punishment. The courts customarily waived such punishment for white vagrants, allowing them to take an oath of poverty instead.
This was great opportunity for potential so-called “employers” (ie, slave owners). The local police could simply arrest any black person who was on the streets, not at work, as a vagrant.
Southern Black Codes provided another source of labor for white employers—black orphans and the children of vagrants or other destitute parents. The South Carolina code authorized courts to apprentice such black children, even against their will, to an employer until age 21 for males and 18 for females. Masters had the right to inflict moderate punishment on their apprentices and to recapture runaways. But the code also required masters to provide food and clothing to their apprentices, teach them a trade, and send them to school.
So if you were unfortunate enough to be a child of one of those persons arrested as “vagrants” and put to hard labor, you ALSO could be forced into unpaid labor.
South Carolina’s Black Code established a racially separate court system for all civil and criminal cases that involved a black plaintiff or defendant. It allowed black witnesses to testify in court, but only in cases affecting “the person or property of a person of color.” Crimes that whites believed freedmen might commit, such as rebellion, arson, burglary, and assaulting a white woman, carried harsh penalties. Most of these crimes carried the death penalty for blacks, but not for whites. Punishments for minor offenses committed by blacks could result in “hiring out” or whipping, penalties rarely imposed on white lawbreakers.
So not only was the system designed to be able to arrest a black person for something as vague as vagrancy, once in the legal system, the trap tightened.
South Carolina’s code reflected the white obsession with controlling the former slaves. It banned black people from possessing most firearms, making or selling liquor, and coming into the state without first posting a bond for “good behavior.” The code made it illegal for them to sell any farm products without written permission from their white employer, supposedly to guard against stealing. Also, blacks could not practice any occupation, except farmer or servant under contract, without getting an annual license from a judge.
Are you getting the picture yet?
Now back to the original source from Pete Daniels here:
http://cisupa.proquest.com/ksc_assets/catalog/10620.pdf During the early years of the twentieth century, magazines and newspapers publicized peonage cases, and as workers discovered that peonage violated a federal law, complaints and prosecutions increased. Most complaints came from the cotton-producing area of the South and traced a crescent from South Carolina to Mississippi and up the Mississippi River through the Delta on both sides. Other cases continued to emerge from the turpentine forests along the Florida-Georgia border and in southern Alabama and Mississippi. In these areas, employers used debt to extract labor.
The debt system was another trap. Blacks had to sign an annual contract, and as part of that contract, usually a month’s wages would be paid in advance, and that would be considered “debt”. As long as they remained in that debt, they had no choice but to continue working for that employer, no matter how badly they were treated. Notice also that the complaints began to get public attention in the twentieth century. In other words, this had been going on for decades already.
And you dare to assert that this affected only a small number of people??
Peonage is a form of labor control that relies on debt to compel the worker. It is involuntary servitude, or slavery. Outlawed by an 1867 federal statute1 that lay dormant for thirty-one years, peonage in its various guises has been defined in a half dozen Supreme Court cases and scores of federal district cases. The documentary sources spread out in many directions•legal literature, state and local records, articles in magazines and newspapers, manuscript collections, and, primarily, the records in the National Archives. When the federal government began enforcing the peonage statute in 1898, the Justice Department accumulated records from U.S. attorneys and other federal officials in the field. It also received complaints directly from those who believed themselves held in peonage, or, when debt was not a factor, in slavery. Citizens who observed such forced labor also appealed to the Justice Department for relief. Thus, the files not only show Justice Department lawyers going about their work, but also U.S. attorneys and federal agents in the field investigating complaints and bringing cases (or dropping them). The files also illuminate the uses of power, especially of local law enforcement officials who often sided with employers to compel workers to pay off their debts or remain at work.
Remember the Black Codes? That made it very easy for law enforcement to find a reason to arrest a strong, healthy, black man.
While most complaints and cases involved rural workers, at times immigrants, coal miners, and others also fell victim to peonage. Almost invariably, peons were people from the lower class who were ill-educated, poor, and vulnerable. This description, of course, applied to many rural workers
in the South. There can never be an accurate measure of the extent of peonage, for debt was the constant companion of many southerners. The crucial element of peonage, however, is compulsion. There is no peonage unless someone is forced to work off a debt. On the other hand, if someone is simply forced to work with no element of debt in the equation, the situation is slavery. Compulsion, as court cases make clear, has many manifestations, including threats and physical coercion. The evolution of the law applying to involuntary servitude has resulted in several tools for prosecuting all kinds of slavery. This was not the case in the first four decades of the twentieth century because the Justice Department rarely pushed a case that did not involve debt, as many of the department's replies to complainants make clear.
Note the underlined sentence:
There can never be an accurate measure of the extent of peonage, for debt was the constant companion of many southerners.Yet somehow you have determined that you (or the royal “we”) have enough information to demonstrate that this only affected a very small number of people.
But we do know that, at this time, the economic success of the South was heavily dependent upon low-cost labor. Convict leasing and peonage provided the lowest cost labor possible – even lower than slavery. Slaves were expensive when first purchased, and many owners took care of their “property” – keeping the slaves healthy enough to live and reproduce, thus providing more labor. But with peonage and convict-leasing the initial cost was even lower than slavery, and there was no incentive to keep them alive for long. If they died, they just replaced them through the same program. Let local law officials know your needs, and they’d use the Black Codes to make the necessary arrests.
From another expert in the field:
http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/cbss/Oshinsky.pdf In theory, at least, the benefits of convict labor to a private employer were obvious enough. Despised, powerless, and expendable, a prisoner could be made to do any job, at any pace, in any location. Why? “Because he is a convict,” a Southern railroad official explained, “and if he dies it is a small loss, and we can make him work there, while we cannot get free men to the same kind of labor for, say, six times as much as the convict costs.”
Their lives were always in peril. A year or two on the Western North Carolina Railroad was akin to a death sentence: convicts were regularly blown to bits in tunnel explosions, buried in mountain landslides, and swept away in springtime floods. At a prison camp of the Greenwood and August Railroad, convicts were used up faster than South Carolina authorities could supply them. Between 1877 and 1879, the G&A “lost” 128 of their 285 prisoners to gunshots, accidents, and disease (a death rate of 45 percent) and another thirty-nine to escapes. Indeed, one has only to look as far as the quote in Mancini’s book title, which comes from a Southern employer explaining the benefits of convict leasing to George Washington Cable in 1883. “Before the war we owned the Negroes,” he said. “If a man had a good nigger, he could afford to take care of him; if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own `em. One dies, get another.”2
Convict labor was widely viewed as cheaper and more reliable to than free labor. A study of the convict lease in Texas asserts that the state’s sugar industry would have been hard pressed to survive without it. In Alabama, the chief engineer of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company told industrialist Henry Clay Frick that convicts, who comprised about one-quarter of the work force, “mined the cheapest coal ever produced by the Company.” He wasn’t merely boasting. “It is an indisputable fact,” said a mining superintendent in Birmingham, that “coal cannot be produced by free labor within 20 cents per ton of what it can be produced by convicts.” (It is no coincidence, notes Mancini, that Alabama was the last state to abolish convict leasing, in 1928). In Florida, private employers were always hard pressed to find workers willing to do “turpentine labor”—a dangerous, physically exhausting job. Convicts filled the void. A local journalist described the “recruitment process” in his area. “Together,” he wrote, “the [county sheriff] and the [turpentine operators] made up a list of some 80 Negroes known to both as good husky fellows, capable of a fair day’s work.” Promised five dollars for each one he landed, the sheriff got them all “on various petty charges—gambling, disorderly conduct, assault, and the like.” Most were gathered “with a dragnet at Saturday-night shindies, and hailed to the local justice, who was in [on] the game.”
This next quote is from Pete Daniels, the first cited article.
While these cases demonstrate the aggressive role of the Justice Department and the Supreme Court in combatting peonage, they did not end it. Indeed, the complaints, investigations, and prosecutions continued steadily, as the evidence in the peonage files makes clear. Reading through case files that end abruptly with no action, or reading cases that end in no indictment from grand juries or that fail in the courtroom will show the federal prosecutors' frustration in attempting to protect the basic rights of laborers. In many cases local juries failed to convict leading citizens charged with peonage, arid at times U.S. attorneys reported that peonage was so widespread that juries saw no justice in making an example of one employer when most of the community used the same coercion. Local law enforcement officers in most cases sided with employers against workers.
Note the underlined sentence:
In many cases local juries failed to convict leading citizens charged with peonage, arid at times U.S. attorneys reported that peonage was so widespread that juries saw no justice in making an example of one employer when most of the community used the same coercion.This isn’t a system that affected a small number of individuals, to the point where its cultural impact can safely be ignored. This was so widespread that most of the community used that same coercion.
Local law enforcement officers in most cases sided with employers against workers. The only appeal for such workers was through federal channels. The scribbled complaints from workers revealed sortie of the most brutal working conditions in the history of the country. Isolated on a farm or in a forest, workers had no champion because sheriffs, local police, and even state authorities supported forced labor. The closed nature of the labor system placed a tight lid over workers, and although thousands of complaints arrived in Washington, these no doubt represented only a fraction of the total number of cases. Federal authorities on the local level often complained that they were only investigating the most flagrant labor abuses. While most of the victims were black workers, there were a number of complaints and cases that involved whites.
Note: most of the victims were black.
Let’s look at another source – from a real, live expert - to try and determine if this practice only affected a small number of individuals – so small that it could have no cultural impact.
http://blackcommentator.com/142/142_slavery_2.html One result of this practice was the shift in prison populations to predominately African-American following the war. Data for Tennessee prisons demonstrates this change. African-Americans represented only 33 percent of the population at the main prison in Nashville as of October 1, 1865, but by November 29, 1867, the percentage had increased to 58.3. By 1869 it had increased to 64 percent and it reached an all-time high of 67 percent between 1877 and 1879; a slight decrease in the number of inmates (especially African-American) between 1880 and 1898 can be explained in part by the opening of two branches of the main prison, Brushy Mountain and Inman, in the 1890s. The population of Brushy Mountain Prison was predominantly African-American, much more so than at the main prison. The only data available for the Inman branch are for prisoners on hand as of December 1, 1898. At that time there were only 58 prisoners, all of whom were African-American.
Data from other states also illustrate the predominance of African-Americans in the Southern prison system after the war. In 1888 the prison at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, held 85 whites and 212 African-Americans; in 1875 in North Carolina 569 African-Americans and 78 whites were sentenced to prison.
The actual increase in the populations within Southern prisons is staggering. In Georgia there was a tenfold increase in prison populations during a four-decade period (1868-1908); in North Carolina the prison population increased from 121 in 1870 to 1,302 in 1890; in Florida the population went from 125 in 1881 to 1,071 in 1904; in Mississippi the population quadrupled between 1871 and 1879; in Alabama it went from 374 in 1869 to 1,878 in 1903 and to 2,453 in 1919.
Convict leasing involved leasing out prisoners to private companies that paid the state a certain fee. The convicts worked for the companies during the day (convicts were usually not paid) outside the prison and returned to their cells at night. Criminologist Thorsten Sellin, in his book Slavery and the Penal System, says that the sole aim of convict leasing “was financial profit to the lessees who exploited the labor of the prisoners to the fullest, and to the government which sold the convicts to the lessees.” One example was a lease system in Alabama. Sellin explains it as follows:
"In 1866, the governor of Alabama leased the penitentiary to a contractor who was charged the sum of five dollars and given a sizable loan. The legislature granted him permission to work the prisoners outside the walls; they were soon found in the Ironton and New Castle mines."
In Tennessee by 1870 convicts were being leased from the main prison at Nashville to three separate railroad companies in Tennessee. During the 1880s the legislature appropriated about $14 million to relieve the railroad companies that had suffered great losses during the war. It is no exaggeration that convicts rebuilt Tennessee's railroads. In 1871 coal mining companies began to use convict labor and by 1882 more than half of the convicts at the Nashville prison were leased out. In 1884 the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railway Company took complete control and leased the entire prison population.
A sociologist once described how one company, especially the owner Joseph E. Brown, made huge profits from convict leasing in Georgia:
”In 1880 Brown, whose fortune could he estimated conservatively at one million dollars, netted $98,000 from the Dade Coal Company. By 1886, Dade Coal was a parent company, owning Walker Iron and Coal, Rising Fawn Iron, Chattanooga Iron, and Rogers Railroad and Ore Banks and leasing Castle Rock Coal Company. An 1889 reorganization resulted in the formation of the Georgia Mining, Manufacturing and Investment Company. This rested largely on a foundation of convict labor.”
The convict lease system was cruel and inhumane, to say the least. Deaths were common and the treatment caused much sickness and suffering. In a coal mine in Georgia convicts were routinely whipped if they did not produce the daily quota of coal. In Alabama inmates were punished by being placed in a “sweat box” during the day in the hot sun. A Louisiana newspaper reported that “it would be more humane to impose the death sentence upon anyone sentenced to a term with the lessee in excess of six years, because the average convict lived no longer than that.” Indeed, the death rate in 1896 was 20 percent. The mortality rate for inmates in the South was 41.3 per thousand convicts, compared to a rate of 14.9 in the North.
We see that the STATES were involved in this practice. We see a dramatic increase in the black prison population. We see businesses making huge profits from the practice.
This was not a small, insignificant practice that impacted few lives. This was an institutionalized practice that, for all intents and purposes, kept significant numbers of African Americans in a continued state of slavery.
Droopy has stated that strong families is the cure. He’s right, but ignores the reality of why African American families are often fractured to begin with. Economic stress is one of the primary factors that creates dysfunction and separation in families. Even more than slavery itself, the decades of peonage and convict leasing that preyed predominantly on blacks in the south devastated families. This ended just one generation ago. There are people alive who were children during this period. So we’ve spent the majority of the history of this country deliberately removing boots from the African American population - particularly in the south – and then, just one generation later – engage in moral judgments against the group for not pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.
What I think the attention on black history that has occurred recently as a result of the GOP’s attempt to rebrand itself demonstrates is that many of its adherents are pretty ignorant of history.