Louisiana Votes to Keep Slavery | Exploiting Black Labor after the Abolition of Slavery

Update: On Election Day, Tuesday November 8, 2022, Louisiana voters chose to keep language in the state constitution that permits slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime.

Four other states Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont voted to adjust the language in their state constitutions that could curtail the use of prison labor.

The 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified by Congress on Dec. 6, 1865, states:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

_____ Previously _____

AOC shares our earlier article dedicated to the rise of prison labor after slaves were freed across America.

Published December 5, 2020

By Kathy Roberts Forde, Chair, Associate Professor, Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Bryan Bowman, Undergraduate journalism major, University of Massachusetts Amherst. First published on The Conversation.

The U.S. criminal justice system is driven by racial disparity.

The Obama administration pursued a plan to reform it. An entire news organization, The Marshall Project, was launched in late 2014 to cover it. Organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Sentencing Project are dedicated to unmaking a system that unjustly targets people of color.

But how did we get this system in the first place? Our ongoing historical research project investigates the relationship between the press and convict labor. While that story is still unfolding, we have learned what few Americans, especially white Americans, know: the dark history that produced our current criminal justice system.

If anything is to change – if we are ever to “end this racial nightmare, and achieve our country,” as James Baldwin put it – we must confront this system and the blighted history that created it.

During Reconstruction, the 12 years following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, former slaves made meaningful political, social and economic gains. Black men voted and even held public office across the South. Biracial experiments in governance flowered. Black literacy surged, surpassing those of whites in some cities. Black schools, churches and social institutions thrived.

As the prominent historian Eric Foner writes in his masterwork on Reconstruction, “Black participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.”

But this moment was short-lived.

As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

History is made by human actors and the choices they make.

According to Douglas Blackmon, author of “Slavery by Another Name,” the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition, and the rest of the country’s accommodation, “explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.”

Designed to reverse black advances, Redemption was an organized effort by white merchants, planters, businessmen and politicians that followed Reconstruction. “Redeemers” employed vicious racial violence and state legislation as tools to prevent black citizenship and equality promised under the 14th and 15th amendments.

By the early 1900s, nearly every southern state had barred black citizens not only from voting but also from serving in public office, on juries and in the administration of the justice system.

The South’s new racial caste system was not merely political and social. It was thoroughly economic. Slavery had made the South’s agriculture-based economy the most powerful force in the global cotton market, but the Civil War devastated this economy.

How to build a new one?

Ironically, white leaders found a solution in the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in the United States in 1865. By exploiting the provision allowing “slavery” and “involuntary servitude” to continue as “a punishment for crime,” they took advantage of a penal system predating the Civil War and used even during Reconstruction.

A new form of control

With the help of profiteering industrialists they found yet a new way to build wealth on the bound labor of black Americans: the convict lease system.

Here’s how it worked. Black men – and sometimes women and children – were arrested and convicted for crimes enumerated in the Black Codes, state laws criminalizing petty offenses and aimed at keeping freed people tied to their former owners’ plantations and farms. The most sinister crime was vagrancy – the “crime” of being unemployed – which brought a large fine that few blacks could afford to pay.

Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the region’s untapped natural resources. As many as 200,000 black Americans were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged and sexually violated. They died by the thousands from injury, disease and torture.

For both the state and private corporations, the opportunities for profit were enormous. For the state, convict lease generated revenue and provided a powerful tool to subjugate African-Americans and intimidate them into behaving in accordance with the new social order. It also greatly reduced state expenses in housing and caring for convicts. For the corporations, convict lease provided droves of cheap, disposable laborers who could be worked to the extremes of human cruelty.

Every southern state leased convicts, and at least nine-tenths of all leased convicts were black. In reports of the period, the terms “convicts” and “negroes” are used interchangeably.

Of those black Americans caught in the convict lease system, a few were men like Henry Nisbet, who murdered nine other black men in Georgia. But the vast majority were like Green Cottenham, the central figure in Blackmon’s book, who was snatched into the system after being charged with vagrancy.

A principal difference between antebellum slavery and convict leasing was that, in the latter, the laborers were only the temporary property of their “masters.” On one hand, this meant that after their fines had been paid off, they would potentially be let free. On the other, it meant the companies leasing convicts often absolved themselves of concerns about workers’ longevity. Such convicts were viewed as disposable and frequently worked beyond human endurance.

The living conditions of leased convicts are documented in dozens of detailed, firsthand reports spanning decades and covering many states. In 1883, Blackmon writes, Alabama prison inspector Reginald Dawson described leased convicts in one mine being held on trivial charges, in “desperate,” “miserable” conditions, poorly fed, clothed, and “unnecessarily chained and shackled.” He described the “appalling number of deaths” and “appalling numbers of maimed and disabled men” held by various forced-labor entrepreneurs spanning the entire state.

Dawson’s reports had no perceptible impact on Alabama’s convict leasing system.

The exploitation of black convict labor by the penal system and industrialists was central to southern politics and economics of the era. It was a carefully crafted answer to black progress during Reconstruction – highly visible and widely known. The system benefited the national economy, too. The federal government passed up one opportunity after another to intervene.

Convict lease ended at different times across the early 20th century, only to be replaced in many states by another racialized and brutal method of convict labor: the chain gang.

Convict labor, debt peonage, lynching – and the white supremacist ideologies of Jim Crow that supported them all – produced a bleak social landscape across the South for African-Americans.

Black Americans developed multiple resistance strategies and gained major victories through the civil rights movement, including Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Jim Crow fell, and America moved closer than ever to fulfilling its democratic promise of equality and opportunity for all.

But in the decades that followed, a “tough on crime” politics with racist undertones produced, among other things, harsh drug and mandatory minimum sentencing laws that were applied in racially disparate ways. The mass incarceration system exploded, with the rate of imprisonment quadrupling between the 1970s and today.

Michelle Alexander famously calls it “The New Jim Crow” in her book of the same name.

Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with 2.2 million behind bars, even though crime has decreased significantly since the early 1990s. And while black Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 37 percent of the incarcerated population. Forty percent of police killings of unarmed people are black men, who make up merely 6 percent of the population, according to a 2015 Washington Post report.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can choose otherwise.

Stars Align In Alabama: Emmett Till; Four Birmingham, Alabama Church-Going Girls; Doug Jones; Dana Schutz & Racial Reconciliation

Toyin Ojih Odutola, Representatives of State (2016/2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Nigerian-born, Huntsville-raised, U of Alabama grad Toyin Ojih Odutola first got the attention of Vogue magazine when the poet Claudia Rankine published as essay in Aperture magazine, "A New Grammar for Blackness'. 

A year later, Toyin Ojih Odutola has mounted a solo show 'To Wander Determined' at the Whitney Museum in New York. Upon entering the show, visitors see a letter written by Odutola in the persona of the 'Deputy Private Secretary' for two aristocratic families in Lagos. 

artNet writes: "For Ojih Odutola, their images form a corrective to a Eurocentric art history that thinks of both court portraiture and genre paintings as belonging to a primarily white world, with black characters as footnotes—cast as servants, slaves, or left out completely.."

The topic of black identity, colonialism, and cultural appropriation have lived front and center in our national -- and international -- dialogue in 2017. 

Zanzibar-born, 2017 Turner Prize Winner, British artist Lubaina Himid also explores black identities in a historical and contemporary web of global prejudice.

On Wednesday Rujeko Hockley & Jane Panetta were named curators of the 2019 Whitney Bienniale. 

Panetta joined the Whitney in 2010 and has curated solo presentations by Willa Nasatir and MacArthur “Genius” Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Hockley, who was came to the museum in March 2017, co-curated the highly acclaimed Brooklyn Museum show “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85.” At the Whitney, she has so far co-curated “Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined,” , on view at the Whitney until February 25, 2018, as well as the ongoing group show “An Incomplete History of Protest.”

Linking the dots here, we have the backdrop of a year that comes at the end of a year marked by intense controversies around cultural appropriation in the art world. Among the most divisive arguments was the public maelstrom around Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket. The painting prompted open letters calling for the removal and even destruction of the painting, silent protests in front of the work, and demands that other works ALL of Dana Shutz's paintings be banned from a show in Boston as punishment for her offense of the Emmett Till painting. 

AOC has written extensively on this controversy, standing on the history of my own long-held commitment to civil rights. Note that I do believe the demands that Dana Schutz, white woman artist, not be allowed to show her artwork and be banished from painting are both chilling and absurd. That pov is expressed in my writing. (See Shutz controversy articles at end of this article.) 

The Whitney's appointment of Rujeko Hockley & Jane Panetta to curate the 2019 biennial seem to be a direct response to the controversy and a willingness to address the critical topic of activism in the age of Trump's America -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

In the art world, the questions of black identity, white power, cultural appropriation, racism and politics are grounded in the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi.  In 2017 Toyin Ojih Odutola's Whitney show 'To Wander Determined' opened against the political backdrop of Charlottesville and the Roy Moore/Doug Jones race for a US Senate seat in Alabama. 

I became deeply involved in this Senate race, both as a symbol of hope if we could beat back Republican theocrat Roy Moore, who believes that God triumphs the US Constitution and that America was happiest when America's families were rock-solid in a Confederacy built on the backs of slaves and women didn't have the right to vote. This is Trump's own idyllic vision for America, based on his embrace of white nationalism.

Tuesday night's Doug Jones upset victory in Alabama astonished all of America, and that includes me, who felt suddenly plunged into a Kentucky Derby race as the voter tide turned for Jones.

In the age of Trump and America's love affair with Trump buddy Steve Bannon's white nationalism, the good guy won. Alabama's new senator, Democrat Doug Jones has a long history with civil rights in the state of Alabama. 

There are many sad chapters in the history of slavery, racism and segregation in America, and especially in states like Alabama and Mississippi. The brutal lynching of Emmett Till shares the spotlight with another horrific crime in the state of Alabama: the September 15, 1963 Birmingham Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by white supremacists -- the KKK, who is much weaker today but very much devoted to the Trump presidency and the white men carrying tiki torches in Charlottesville, Va. 

Described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as "one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity, the church explosion killed four young girls and injured 22 others.  Those four girls were Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.

Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.

In 1965, the FBI concluded that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was the work of four known Ku Klux Klansmen and white segregationists -- Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry. 

At the time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his investigators knew the attackers' names and even had secret recordings to prove that the four men were behind the Birmingham church bombing. Because Hoover himself was a segregationist and white nationalist, he sealed those files away, making it much more difficult to prosecute the crime. 

While I write a separate article sharing all the details of how the cases proceeded -- when our focus is on the artwork of Huntsville-raised,  U of Alabama grad Toyin Ojih Odutola -- it was the new Democratic senator from Alabama Doug Jones who successfully prosecuted the two remaining living Klansmen Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., convicted in 2001; and Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted in 2002.

According to Sharony A. Green, a professor of history at the University of Alabama, Jones’ victory is particularly significant given the state’s racial politics: Jones, a man who made his name prosecuting the KKK, beat an opponent who, when asked when American was last “great,” replied: “I think it was great at the time when families were united, even though we had slavery.”

Against this political and artistic landscape, Whitney Biennial curators Rujeko Hockley & Jane Panetta have an outstanding and unique opportunity to use the highest level of artistic activism in years for the public good -- and to discuss public morality and American values.

Many hope that Trump will be impeached as a result of the Mueller investigation and Trump-family ties to Russia. I say "no" because such an action sets up the presidency of current VP Mike Pence, who is an even more dangerous threat to American values. Pence is a true theocrat -- Roy Moore made palatable to Republicans. 

To Wander Determined” is on view at the Whitney Museum through February 25. 

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Excavations (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Wall of Ambassadors (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Winter Dispatch (2016). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Surveying the Family Seat (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Installation view, “To Wander Determined” at the Whitney Museum. Left: The Missionary (2017), R: By Her Design (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Industry (Husband and Wife) (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Newlyweds On Holiday (2016). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Michigan Introduces Bill To Mandate Teaching Slavery As It Existed In American History

In the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va, Democrats in Michigan's House of Representatives are pushing for legislation requiring that African-American history is a mandatory part of the curriculum in all public schools. 

This new legislation sponsored by Democratic Rep. Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, explains The Root, the lead sponsor, is critical due to growing attempts by Republican-led school boards to rewrite the history of slavery in America. 

“We all have to do a better job of getting to know each other and understand each other,” Democratic Rep. Sherry Gay-Dagnogo says. “But it starts in our schools in educating children properly so they’re able to push back when they hear lies pushed forward about different races of people.”

The Texas Board of Education, in particular, has led the way in rewriting the history of slavery in America, changing the verbiage around the presence of Africans on plantations to 'workers' rather than slaves. More than one school board has tried to position the history of slavery as one akin to the temporary migrant workers who harvest food crops in America. 

AOC has written about this Texas Board of Education problem for years, although it's less relevant now in the time of on-demand printing. Previously, Texas school books dominated all text books, with an inability to customize text books for each state, due to economies of scale in book publishing. Now the blue state schools do not use the Texas text books, choosing to present a more honest vision of history. 

In the ongoing fight over the determination of social conservatives to rewrite America's history of separation between church and state, Texas put into the textbooks the assertion that Moses actually influenced the writing of the US Constitution.  

We're dealing today with Trump voters who actually believe that Trump is operating as a soldier for God. 

From Slaves to 'Workers'

In October of 2015, a 15-year-old student in Houston Coby Burren sent an image of a page in a McGraw-Hill Education geography textbook to his mom because it refers to Africans brought to American plantations as 'workers', rather than slaves. 

“It talked about the U.S.A. being a country of immigration, but mentioning the slave trade in terms of immigration was just off,” said Ms. Dean-Burren, who is black. “It’s that nuance of language. This is what erasure looks like," wrote the New York Times

“It’s no accident that this happened in Texas,” Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that has criticized the content of state-approved textbooks, responded in October 2015. “We have a textbook adoption process that’s so politicized and so flawed that it’s become almost a punch line for comedians.”