Slavery by Another Name-Student Version PDF

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CRMJ 345: Race and Crime Viewing Guide: Slavery by Another Name 1. What amendment “freed” enslaved people? Approximately how many people were “freed”? 13th amendment and four million 2. Who is Douglas Blackmon? Author of slavery by another name 3. What was the state of the cotton economy in the South after the end of the Civil War? It was devastated. Fields had been burned and cotton gins had been destroyed. Primary engine of the cotton economy, that being the labor of slaves was lost. 4. How much “capital” was lost in the South when slavery was formally ended? A huge loss of capital to Southern slaveholders 5. What were white people worried about after the end of slavery? They were worried that these people were going to take revenge. They were also worried that people aren’t going to do any work anymore. 6. What were the conditions of most whites in the South? Poverty was widespread and about a third of whites were illiterate. 7. What effort did Congress implement in 1866? What was the objective of this effort? The fourteenth amendment. It recognized the citizenship of all freed people. 8. What happened in 1874? By 1874, voters had shifted the balance of power in congress, allowing for the South’s return to local control. 9. What did Blackmon learn about the Emancipation Proclamation? He learned that it brought an end to slavery. He was also taught that the end of slavery unleashed this population of people who were ill equipped for freedom. He came to realize that that fundamentally didn’t happen. 10. What kinds of laws were passed after Reconstruction? 11. It was a crime in the South for a farm worker to walk beside a railroad. It was a crime in the South to speak loudly in the company of white women. It was a crime to sell the products of your farm after dark. Anything from spitting or drinking or being drunk in public could result in confinement. 12. What are “pig laws”? Laws that enhanced penalties for what had been previously misdemeanor offenses, to now felony offenses. 13. What were the most damaging laws that were passed? The most damaging were the vagrancy statues. In every Southern state, you became a criminal if you could not prove at any given moment that you were employed. 14. What was the racial composition of people in criminal courts during slavery? After slavery? Most black crime was punished by slaveholders, leaving the courts to discipline whites. After slavery, only 10% of those arrested were white. 15. How did Southern states begin to treat prisoners after the end of slavery? They placed prisoners with industries that would bear the cost of guarding and housing them, in exchange for their labor. States also began to charge fees, renting prisoners to companies by the month. The highest rates were for the strongest workers and the longest sentences. 16. What was the exception that was made in the 13th Amendment? What “wiggle room” did this provide? The exception was that slavery was abolished except in the case of a punishment for a crime. That wiggle room provided the possibility of extending slavery by another name. 17. Why was the state pleased with the convict leasing system? It allowed the state to realize that prisoners could be a source of profit. Revenue started to come in. States throughout the South started to engage in some form of leasing convicts to private industry. 18. Who were “convicts” being leased to? Private industries, corporations, etc.

19. How does Ezekiel Archey describe the experience of convict leasing? (Discussed at multiple points.) He describes it as a man drowning and that convicts have lost every friend on earth. They have suffered years. They have looked death in the face, worked hungry, thirsty, half-clothed and sore. 20. How did convict leasing contribute to the development of the South? The labor from African Americans made it profitable in manufacturing iron and in rolling mills. Railroads were also being built. 21. Who is J.W. Comer? He was a former slaveholder whose enterprises now included convict mining. He brutalized and whipped blacks. 22. Why was convict leasing described as being “worse than slavery”? Slaves had been a significant long-term investment. A convict could be rented for as little as$9 a month. 23. How much less did “convicts” cost than paid laborers? How did the presence of “convict” labor impact the wages of paid laborers? Convict minors cost as much as 50% to 80% less than free miners and could be worked 6 days a week. Their presence allowed companies to depress wages and resist unions. 24. How old were “convict” laborers? In many labor camps, as many as a third of male convicts were boys younger than 16. 25. Were women also “convict” laborers? What kinds of industries were African American women laboring in? Black women worked in brickyards, turpentine camps, mining camps, farms, and in lumberyards. 26. Why were “sweeps” conducted?’ Sweeps were conducted if there was a dice game going on, an altercation happing, and being mouthy or uppity. 27. What were the charges for approximately 2/3 of those arrested under the convict leasing system? More than 2/3 were convicted under vague charges of burglary and larceny. 28. What percentage of people died in prison camps in Alabama? 30 t0 40% a year 29. What happened to the African American prison population in the South? How was this interpreted? The South’s prison population reached 19,000 people by 1890. This was interpreted as black prisoners seemed to reflect an alarming rise in black crime. 30. What idea does the growing African American prison population “cement” in people’s minds? It cements that relationship between criminality and race in people’s minds to the degree that it’s seen as something inherent. 31. What was the decision the US Supreme Court made in 1896? Segregation was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1896 ruling, Plessy versus Ferguson. 32. What images are shown in the film? Lynching of black men and women, young black men in the fields 33. What additional strategy was used to tie African Americans to white employers? Many African Americans were tied to White employers through various forms of debt. If you get a person in debt, you continually keep him in debt and never let him work it off, so then you control their labor. 34. What did President Theodore Roosevelt authorize? He authorized a federal investigation into peonage in the Alabama counties of Shelby, Coosa, and Tallapoosa. He believed the exposure of the sins of society and the sins of commerce industrialism would lead to their eradication. 35. What happened to John Davis? He was sentenced and charged fines and court fees, which he could not pay. The local whites paid the court and took control of them. He was bought from the court and then resold for profit. 36. What did the contracts authorize? These contracts gave employers the right to whip, confine, and event trade workers, as long as the debt was deemed unpaid.

37. What does Warren Reese’s investigations reveal about debt peonage and the criminal justice system? Peonage was not isolated in a few counties, but was evident throughout the state, trapping hundreds or even thousands of people. He found a totally corrupt system, where you had the justices of the peace were corrupt, in that the people that came before them may not be guilty, but they would find them guilty. 38. What did James Kennedy do as a result of the federal grand jury indictments? Starts at 47: 25 mins 39. Who else was impacted by the peonage decisions? Black southerners were also impacted by the peonage decisions 40. What do the 30,000 pages of letters in the National Archives suggest about African Americans’ belief in the presidency? They had tremendous hope that the government and the president would protect them from the slavery that they thought was supposed to be over. They believed that the president was finally coming to their rescue. 41. What were the outcomes of the Judge Jones’ hearings? He imposed minimum sentences. If people were convicted, some of them got fines, a few of them even served a little jail time, that that would furnish an example so that people who were doing this would no longer do it. 42. What was the “gray area”? Because there was a 13th amendment that abolished slavery, but there was never a statute passed to make you guilty of slavery, of holding somebody in slavery after the Civil War. 43. What did President Roosevelt do in 1903 and 1906? In 1903, he granted a pardon to the Cosbys. In 1906, he also pardoned John W. Pace. Pace never went to prison and he continued to use forced laborers on his farm. 44. What happened to Green Cottenham? He was convicted of vagrancy, sentenced to 3 months hard labor, and $38 in fines. To pay the fine, the labor was extended to 6 months and Green was sent to the Pratt Mines, which paid the country $12 a month for him. 45. How many African Americans moved out of the South between 1910 and 1930? Why did the move? 2 million; They were tired of putting up with the threat of lynching, being grabbed off the street and put in jail and made to work and had to be quiet so they wouldn’t offend anybody. 46. What did President Woodrow Wilson implement during his presidency? He mandated Southern-style segregation throughout the federal government. Government was going to adopt those practices in relations to the ways in which it organizes its own affairs. 47. How did convict leasing change in the early 1900s? Growing numbers of states began to use prisoners on state-run enterprises. 48. What become the “icon” of the modernizing South? Chained together, prisoners on the road crews became an icon of the modernizing South. 49. What is sharecropping? A sharecropper will agree to work for a percentage of the proceeds of the sale of the cotton crop. Sharecroppers had to take out loans in order to survive and in order to bring the crop in during the year. 50. What were the interest rates of sharecropping financing? 70, 90% interest rates 51. What happened if a sharecropped left the farm? If a sharecropper left, they were subject to arrest by the sheriff, and if they were arrested, they would then be returned to the very same farms, often times in chains, receiving nothing. 52. What did John Williams do according to the “family stories”? What was the reality? The family story was that he had worked prisoners on his farm, that they were hardened criminals and they had been put in penitentiary for a long time. One night a lot of the prisoners tried to escape, so he and other farmers tracked them down and in the process of recapturing them, killed some of them. The reality is that he systematically hunted and murdered 11 black workers. Some were bludgeoned, others were weighted down with chains and forced into a nearby river.

53. What distinction does John Williams have? He was the first Southern white man since 1877 to be indicted for the first-degree murder of an African American. 54. When was the next time a white man was indicted for first degree murder of an African American? It did not happen again until 1966. 55. What happened to inspire the end of state convict leasing in Florida? The death of a white man named Martin Talbert. He was charged with vagrancy and sold to a lumber company. He was whipped so many times that he collapsed into his bed and died. 56. What was the original focus of the civil rights section of the Department of Justice? Its focus was on labor issues, not racial equality. 57. How did Viola Cosley’s son end up as a forced laborer? He answered an advertisement in the post paper for a job and ended up being guarded all night by armed guards and not allowed to write home. He became a forced laborer. 58. What was Circular 3591? It said that federal attorneys were to aggressively prosecute any case of involuntary servitude or slavery, not only those defined as peonage. 59. When does Douglas Blackmon mark the “technical end” of slavery in America? 1942 is when he marks the technical end of slavery in America. 60. What happened to Green Cottenham? He never made it out of the Birmingham prison. He survived 5 months before becoming ill. He went to see a doctor in August and never went back to the mine. Thirteen days later, he died. 61. What was the “miracle” performed by American society, according to Blackmon? Those 4 million whites living in poor conditions became 40 million middle-class Americans by the beginning of World War II. All of that was done in a way that excluded African Americans and brutalized African Americans at the same time....