Latter-day slave trade

A 10-year-old book that I missed back then makes for stimulating reading during Black History Month. Historian Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name (Random House, 2008) mentions the familiar tragedy of Ku Klux Klan intimidation and lynchings, but then relates well a largely untold story: “Wholesaling and retailing of slaves regenerated itself around convict leasing in the 1870s and 1880s.”

Blackmon shows how African-Americans who seemed “uppity” were often arrested on flimsy charges and forced to work in mines or on farms. At least 100,000 went through capture and imprisonment for violating laws specifically written to intimidate blacks, such as changing employers without permission or engaging in loud talk.

Blackmon describes how “the job of a county sheriff became a heady enterprise, often more akin to the business of trading in mules than law enforcement. Sheriffs and their local judges developed special relationships with local companies and preferred acquirers of their prisoners. Arrests surged and fell, not as acts of crime increased or receded, but in tandem to the varying needs of the buyers of labor. … The span of time from arrest to conviction and judgment to delivery at a slave mine or mill was often no more than 72 hours.”

A Supreme Court ruling in 1883 made civil rights a local, not a federal, issue and made life for some African-Americans even worse than under slavery: “Slaves of the earlier era were at least minimally insulated from physical harm by their intrinsic financial value,” but under the new order the death of a physically abused convict produced no financial penalty. Neo-slavery continued into the 20th century, and the result was “cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat” and repeated “tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities.”

I also missed David Oshinsky’s Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (Free Press, 1996), which shows how journalists and pastors were complicit in injustice: “Most newspapers either ignored mob killings or hid them on the bottom of an inside page (‘Four Negroes Lynched in Grenada’).” Other newspapers supported lynchings, advertised them in advance, “or even forecast them like the weather (‘Prospects Good for a Lynching, and Indications Are That When It Comes It Will Be Wholesale’).”

Lynchings weren’t even the worst: The Jackson Clarion-Ledger in 1902 ran this banner headline about an event witnessed by 5,000: “BURNED AT THE STAKE.” Pastors did not talk about the gruesome events: Oshinsky notes that “white ministers avoided the subject because it made their congregations ‘uncomfortable.’” In essence, the United States had a form of Shariah law: Delta attorney S.F. Davis said, “Judges, lawyers, and jurors all know that some of our laws are to be enforced against everyone, while others of our laws are to be enforced only against the white people, and others … only against the Negroes.”

African-American women who were raped had little recourse. An African-American man, when arrested, could rarely afford a lawyer, so a judge assigned him one whose primary function was not to serve his client but to eliminate the time and expense of a public trial. Clients, even if innocent, generally plea-bargained so as to get two rather than 10 years in the state prison, Parchman Farm, where a superintendent lived in a mansion and functioned as the equivalent of an antebellum master.

Oshinsky, with solid historical research, shows that life for African-Americans not in prison wasn’t all that different from pre–Civil War existence. Most were sharecroppers who bought supplies at the company store. Planters kept workers perpetually in debt and often cheated them. According to Mississippi law, it was illegal for a tenant to break his contract after taking an advance, no matter how small, so “debt servitude—a form of latter-day slavery—flourished.”

Following the Civil War other states from South Carolina to Texas set up similar “Black Codes.” Some whites saw unfairness, but others lorded over those who faced prison if they pushed back.