1880-1915
1880-1915
1.
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
slavery?
Describe how black peonage and black chain gangs fit into the South's economic, legal,
and criminal systems in this era. Whose interests did peonage and chain gangs serve?
How did the conditions of peonage and the chain gang compare with the conditions of
government play?
2. What role did black people play in seeking to end peonage? What role did the federal
from lynching for blacks? For whites?
3. Discuss lynching as both a spectacle and a symbol. What were the lessons to be learned
4. After 1892, the number of lynchings declined (see Tables 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3). Speculate
about the reasons for this decline. Could a lynching happen today? Why or why not?
resistance?
5. How do peonage, lynching, the chain gang, and the campaigns to abolish them
illustrate the tension between constraint and agency, between oppression andENT PROJECT
CHAPTER 9 Black Life and Culture during the Nadir
Chain Gang
Convict labor in the South assumed two major forms: prison farms and chain gangs.
The latter in particular were a feature of southern urban and rural life between the late
nineteenth century, when southern states instituted the use of chain gangs, and the
1950s, when these states formally abolished the practice. This photograph of members
of a southern black chain gang reveals both their humanity and their dehumanization.
The image invites the viewer's attention and concern because the subjects are looking
directly yet nonthreateningly at the camera. Their youth is signaled by their lack of
facial hair; and the chains, striped uniforms, and work axes clearly convey their
criminalization.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.,
LC-D401-16155.
1880-
QUE1880-1915
Agency and Constraint
Letter to the Editor From the South, 1911
what the writer has to say about the Crisis itself.
In August 1911, W. E. B. Du Bois published this letter sent to him as editor of the Crisis.
It provides details about the peonage system and life in the Jim Crow South. Notice
Kind Sir:
of the law.
any money,
pay just
I am not an educated man. I will give you the
peonage system as it is practised here in the name
If a colored man is arrested here and hasn't
whether he is guilty or not, he has to
the same. A man of color is never tried in
Of course we can't prove anything. Our word
is nothing. If we state things as they are, the pow-
ers that be make a different statement, and that
sets ours aside at Washington and, I suppose, in
this country. It is simply a farce. Everything is
fixed before he enters the courtroom. I will try to
Heaven, too.
give you an
illustration of how it is done:
I am
Now, I have tried to tell you how we are made
servants here according to law. I will tell you in
my next letter how the lawmakers keep the
fine and take me to his
year in
farce of being tried. The whole of my fine may
amount to fifty dollars. A kindly appearing man
brought in a prisoner, go through the colored children out of schools, how that pres-
will come up and pay my
farm to allow me to work it out. At the end of a
month I find that I owe him more than I did
when I went there. The debt is increased
and year out. You would ask, "How is that?" It is
simply that he is charging you more for your
board, lodging and washing than they allow you
for your work, and you can't help yourself either,
nor can anyone else help you, because you are
still a prisoner and never get your fine worked
out. If you do as they say and be a good Negro,
you are allowed to marry, provided you can get
someone to have you, and of course the debt still
increases. This is in the United States, where it is
supposed that every man has equal rights before
sure is brought to bear on their parents in such a
manner they cannot help themselves. The cheap-
est way we can borrow money here is at the rate
of twenty-five cents on the dollar per year.
Your
paper is the best I have read of the kind.
I never dreamed there was such a paper in the
world. I will subscribe soon. I think there are a
great many here that will take your paper. I
haven't had the chance to show your paper to any
yet, but will as soon as I can. You know we have
to be careful with such literature as this in this
country.
the law, and we are held in bondage by this same
outfit.
SOURCE: Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the
Negro People in the United States, vol. 3, 1910-1932 (New York:
Citadel Press, 1977), 31-32.
DOCUMENT PROJECT
What I have told you is strictly confidential. If
you publish it, don't put my name to it. I would
be dead in a short time after the news reached
here.
One word more about the peonage. The court
and the man you work for are always partners.
One makes the fine and the other one works you
and holds you, and if you leave you are tracked
up with bloodhounds and brought back.
His
A
385DOCUMENT PROJECT
CHAPTER 9 Black Life and Culture during the Nadir
By the time he has worked out his first debt
another is hanging over his head, and so on and
so on, by a sort of endless chain, for an indefinite
period, as in every case the indebtedness is arbi-
trarily arranged by the employer. In many cases it
is very evident that the court officials are in collu-
sion with the proprietors or agents, and that they
divide the "graft" among themselves. . . .
out-
But I didn't tell you how I got out. I didn't get
they put me out. When I had served as a
peon for nearly three years
and you remember
that they claimed I owed them only $165 - when
I had served for nearly three years one of the
bosses came to me and said that my time was up.
He happened to be the one who was said to be
—
Si
everal Southern laws, which have reduced
Negro farm hands to virtual peonage, are to be
tested before the United States Supreme Court.
The case is the appeal of an Alabama Negro con-
victed of violating the contract law, upheld by
the State Supreme Court, under which he was
sentenced to a fine equivalent to 126 days' hard
labor for the county. The Federal Department
of Justice believes that the law imposes compul-
sory service in satisfaction of debt, reducing
the Negroes to actual slavery.
W. E. B. Du Bois | Along the Color Line, 1910
W. E. B. DU BOIS (1868-1963), a founder of the NAACP and editor of its journal, the Crisis,
wrote this editorial on Bailey v. Alabama in the journal's second issue, in December 1910.
At the time, the case was making its way through the courts. Notice the position of
the U.S. Department of Justice in relation to Alabama's contract labor law. The Supreme
Court ruling, issued in 1911, declared Alabama's peonage law unconstitutional.
The law provides that in contracts of service
entered into by a laborer, where money was
advanced, and the contract broken without just
cause, and the money not refunded, the laborer
is guilty, and may be sentenced to hard labor
1880-1915
SOURCE: Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the
Negro People in the United States, vol. 3, 1910-1932 (New York:
Citadel Press, 1977), 31-32.
living with my wife. He gave me a new suit of
overalls, which cost about seventy-five cents,
took me in a buggy and carried me across the
Broad River into South Carolina, set me down
and told me to "git." I didn't have a cent of money,
and I wasn't feeling well, but somehow I man-
aged to get a move on me. I begged my way to
Columbia. In two or three days I ran across a man
looking for laborers to carry to Birmingham, and
I joined his gang. I have been here in the
Birmingham district since they released me, and
I reckon I'll die either in a coal mine or an iron
furnace. It don't make much difference which.
Either is better than a Georgia peon camp. And a
Georgia peon camp is hell itself!
1880-1915
Let
In A
wh
Kind Si
I ar
until the fine is worked out. The Federal Depart-
ment contends that the purpose and effect of the
law is not to stop fraudulent practices so much as
to impose compulsory service upon the Negroes
who constitute the bulk of the farm labor of the
State. The point that will be attacked most vigor-
ously is the Alabama rule of evidence in such
cases, which, in practice, assumes the Negro
accused was guilty of intent to defraud, "contrary
to the axiomatic and elementary principle of pre-
sumption of innocence in a criminal procedure."
The reports of the abuses existing under this
contract system in the South have aroused wide-
spread indignation as they have appeared from
time to time when some exceptionally flagrant
case was forced into publicity. Now that the
Department of Justice has become interested,
and the issue is to be placed before the supreme
tribunal, a definite pronouncement may be
expected.
peona
of the
If
any
pay
this
fix
fDOCUMENT PROJECT
CHAPTER 9 Black Life and Culture during the Nadir
By the time he has worked out his first debt
another is hanging over his head, and so on and
so on, by a sort of endless chain, for an indefinite
period, as in every case the indebtedness is arbi-
trarily arranged by the employer. In many cases it
is very evident that the court officials are in collu-
sion with the proprietors or agents, and that they
divide the "graft" among themselves. . . .
out-
But I didn't tell you how I got out. I didn't get
they put me out. When I had served as a
peon for nearly three years
and you remember
that they claimed I owed them only $165 - when
I had served for nearly three years one of the
bosses came to me and said that my time was up.
He happened to be the one who was said to be
—
Si
everal Southern laws, which have reduced
Negro farm hands to virtual peonage, are to be
tested before the United States Supreme Court.
The case is the appeal of an Alabama Negro con-
victed of violating the contract law, upheld by
the State Supreme Court, under which he was
sentenced to a fine equivalent to 126 days' hard
labor for the county. The Federal Department
of Justice believes that the law imposes compul-
sory service in satisfaction of debt, reducing
the Negroes to actual slavery.
W. E. B. Du Bois | Along the Color Line, 1910
W. E. B. DU BOIS (1868-1963), a founder of the NAACP and editor of its journal, the Crisis,
wrote this editorial on Bailey v. Alabama in the journal's second issue, in December 1910.
At the time, the case was making its way through the courts. Notice the position of
the U.S. Department of Justice in relation to Alabama's contract labor law. The Supreme
Court ruling, issued in 1911, declared Alabama's peonage law unconstitutional.
The law provides that in contracts of service
entered into by a laborer, where money was
advanced, and the contract broken without just
cause, and the money not refunded, the laborer
is guilty, and may be sentenced to hard labor
1880-1915
SOURCE: Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the
Negro People in the United States, vol. 3, 1910-1932 (New York:
Citadel Press, 1977), 31-32.
living with my wife. He gave me a new suit of
overalls, which cost about seventy-five cents,
took me in a buggy and carried me across the
Broad River into South Carolina, set me down
and told me to "git." I didn't have a cent of money,
and I wasn't feeling well, but somehow I man-
aged to get a move on me. I begged my way to
Columbia. In two or three days I ran across a man
looking for laborers to carry to Birmingham, and
I joined his gang. I have been here in the
Birmingham district since they released me, and
I reckon I'll die either in a coal mine or an iron
furnace. It don't make much difference which.
Either is better than a Georgia peon camp. And a
Georgia peon camp is hell itself!
1880-1915
Let
In A
wh
Kind Si
I ar
until the fine is worked out. The Federal Depart-
ment contends that the purpose and effect of the
law is not to stop fraudulent practices so much as
to impose compulsory service upon the Negroes
who constitute the bulk of the farm labor of the
State. The point that will be attacked most vigor-
ously is the Alabama rule of evidence in such
cases, which, in practice, assumes the Negro
accused was guilty of intent to defraud, "contrary
to the axiomatic and elementary principle of pre-
sumption of innocence in a criminal procedure."
The reports of the abuses existing under this
contract system in the South have aroused wide-
spread indignation as they have appeared from
time to time when some exceptionally flagrant
case was forced into publicity. Now that the
Department of Justice has become interested,
and the issue is to be placed before the supreme
tribunal, a definite pronouncement may be
expected.
peona
of the
If
any
pay
this
fix
fDOCUMENT PROJECT
CHAPTER 9 Black Life and Culture during the Nadir
By the time he has worked out his first debt
another is hanging over his head, and so on and
so on, by a sort of endless chain, for an indefinite
period, as in every case the indebtedness is arbi-
trarily arranged by the employer. In many cases it
is very evident that the court officials are in collu-
sion with the proprietors or agents, and that they
divide the "graft" among themselves. . . .
out-
But I didn't tell you how I got out. I didn't get
they put me out. When I had served as a
peon for nearly three years
and you remember
that they claimed I owed them only $165 - when
I had served for nearly three years one of the
bosses came to me and said that my time was up.
He happened to be the one who was said to be
—
Si
everal Southern laws, which have reduced
Negro farm hands to virtual peonage, are to be
tested before the United States Supreme Court.
The case is the appeal of an Alabama Negro con-
victed of violating the contract law, upheld by
the State Supreme Court, under which he was
sentenced to a fine equivalent to 126 days' hard
labor for the county. The Federal Department
of Justice believes that the law imposes compul-
sory service in satisfaction of debt, reducing
the Negroes to actual slavery.
W. E. B. Du Bois | Along the Color Line, 1910
W. E. B. DU BOIS (1868-1963), a founder of the NAACP and editor of its journal, the Crisis,
wrote this editorial on Bailey v. Alabama in the journal's second issue, in December 1910.
At the time, the case was making its way through the courts. Notice the position of
the U.S. Department of Justice in relation to Alabama's contract labor law. The Supreme
Court ruling, issued in 1911, declared Alabama's peonage law unconstitutional.
The law provides that in contracts of service
entered into by a laborer, where money was
advanced, and the contract broken without just
cause, and the money not refunded, the laborer
is guilty, and may be sentenced to hard labor
1880-1915
SOURCE: Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the
Negro People in the United States, vol. 3, 1910-1932 (New York:
Citadel Press, 1977), 31-32.
living with my wife. He gave me a new suit of
overalls, which cost about seventy-five cents,
took me in a buggy and carried me across the
Broad River into South Carolina, set me down
and told me to "git." I didn't have a cent of money,
and I wasn't feeling well, but somehow I man-
aged to get a move on me. I begged my way to
Columbia. In two or three days I ran across a man
looking for laborers to carry to Birmingham, and
I joined his gang. I have been here in the
Birmingham district since they released me, and
I reckon I'll die either in a coal mine or an iron
furnace. It don't make much difference which.
Either is better than a Georgia peon camp. And a
Georgia peon camp is hell itself!
1880-1915
Let
In A
wh
Kind Si
I ar
until the fine is worked out. The Federal Depart-
ment contends that the purpose and effect of the
law is not to stop fraudulent practices so much as
to impose compulsory service upon the Negroes
who constitute the bulk of the farm labor of the
State. The point that will be attacked most vigor-
ously is the Alabama rule of evidence in such
cases, which, in practice, assumes the Negro
accused was guilty of intent to defraud, "contrary
to the axiomatic and elementary principle of pre-
sumption of innocence in a criminal procedure."
The reports of the abuses existing under this
contract system in the South have aroused wide-
spread indignation as they have appeared from
time to time when some exceptionally flagrant
case was forced into publicity. Now that the
Department of Justice has become interested,
and the issue is to be placed before the supreme
tribunal, a definite pronouncement may be
expected.
peona
of the
If
any
pay
this
fix
fDOCUMENT PROJECT
CHAPTER 9 Black Life and Culture during the Nadir
A Georgia Negro Peon The New Slavery in the South, 1904
This narrative first appeared in February 1904 in the New York magazine the Independent.
It was told to a representative of the magazine, who then prepared it for publication. The
narrative begins with a sharecropper and a storekeeper settling their account, which, not
surprisingly, comes out in the storekeeper's favor. Look for ways that peonage operated
differently.
as a system, paying particular attention to the ways it affected black men and women
1880-1915
war in Elbert County, Ga., and I reckon by this
am a negro and was born some time during the Really we had made ourselves lifetime slaves, or
peons, as the laws called us. But call it slavery,
peonage, or what not, the truth is we lived in
hell on earth what time we spent in the Senator's
time I must be a little over forty years old.
The storekeeper took us one by one and
read to us statements of our accounts. According
to the books there was no man of us who owed
the Senator less than $100; some of us were put
down for as much as $200. I owed $165, accord-
ing to the bookkeeper. These debts were not
accumulated during one year, but ran back for
three and four years, so we were told - in spite
of the fact that we understood that we had had a
full settlement at the end of each year. But no one
of us would have dared to dispute a white man's
word-oh, no; not in those days. Besides, we
fellows didn't care anything about the amounts
we were after getting away; and we had been told
that we might go, if we signed the acknowledge-
ments. We would have signed anything, just to
get away. So we stepped up, we did, and made
our marks. That same night we were rounded up
by a constable and ten or twelve white men, who
aided him, and we were locked up, every one of
us, in one of the Senator's stockades. The next
morning it was explained to us by the two guards
appointed to watch us that, in the papers we had
signed the day before, we had not only made
acknowledgement of our indebtedness, but that
we had also agreed to work for the Senator until
the debts were paid by hard labor. And from that
day forward we were treated just like convicts.
SOURCE: Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the
Negro People in the United States, vol. 2, From the Reconstruction
835-38.
Era to 1910, 5th ed. (New York: Citadel Press, 1970), 832,
—
a
1880-19
were ce
[sic] ye
that a
broug
twice
color
peon camp.
I lived in that camp, as a peon, for nearly three
years. My wife fared better than I did, as did the
wives of some of the other Negroes, because the
white men about the camp used these unfortu-
nate creatures as their mistresses. When I was
first put in the stockade my wife was still kept for
a while in the "Big House," but my little boy, who
was only nine years old, was given away to a
Negro family across the river in South Carolina,
and I never saw or heard of him after that. When
I left the camp my wife had had two children by
some one of the white bosses, and she was
living
in a fairly good shape in a little house off to her-
self. But the poor Negro women who were not in
the class with my wife fared about as bad as the
helpless Negro men. Most of the time the women
who were peons or convicts were compelled to
wear men's clothes. Sometimes, when I have seen
them dressed like men, and plowing or hoeing
or hauling logs or working at the blacksmith's
trade, just the same as men, my heart would
bleed and my
blood would boil, but I was power-
less to raise a hand. It would have meant death
on the spot to have said a word. Of the first six
women brought to the camp, two of them gave
birth to children after they had been there more
than twelve months and the babies had white
men for their fathers!
nigh
day
slee
ba:
The stockades in which we slept, were, I
believe, the filthiest places in the world. They
or
br
h
tDOCUMENT PROJECT
CHAPTER 9 Black Life and Culture during the Nadir
A Georgia Negro Peon The New Slavery in the South, 1904
This narrative first appeared in February 1904 in the New York magazine the Independent.
It was told to a representative of the magazine, who then prepared it for publication. The
narrative begins with a sharecropper and a storekeeper settling their account, which, not
surprisingly, comes out in the storekeeper's favor. Look for ways that peonage operated
differently.
as a system, paying particular attention to the ways it affected black men and women
1880-1915
war in Elbert County, Ga., and I reckon by this
am a negro and was born some time during the Really we had made ourselves lifetime slaves, or
peons, as the laws called us. But call it slavery,
peonage, or what not, the truth is we lived in
hell on earth what time we spent in the Senator's
time I must be a little over forty years old.
The storekeeper took us one by one and
read to us statements of our accounts. According
to the books there was no man of us who owed
the Senator less than $100; some of us were put
down for as much as $200. I owed $165, accord-
ing to the bookkeeper. These debts were not
accumulated during one year, but ran back for
three and four years, so we were told - in spite
of the fact that we understood that we had had a
full settlement at the end of each year. But no one
of us would have dared to dispute a white man's
word-oh, no; not in those days. Besides, we
fellows didn't care anything about the amounts
we were after getting away; and we had been told
that we might go, if we signed the acknowledge-
ments. We would have signed anything, just to
get away. So we stepped up, we did, and made
our marks. That same night we were rounded up
by a constable and ten or twelve white men, who
aided him, and we were locked up, every one of
us, in one of the Senator's stockades. The next
morning it was explained to us by the two guards
appointed to watch us that, in the papers we had
signed the day before, we had not only made
acknowledgement of our indebtedness, but that
we had also agreed to work for the Senator until
the debts were paid by hard labor. And from that
day forward we were treated just like convicts.
SOURCE: Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the
Negro People in the United States, vol. 2, From the Reconstruction
835-38.
Era to 1910, 5th ed. (New York: Citadel Press, 1970), 832,
—
a
1880-19
were ce
[sic] ye
that a
broug
twice
color
peon camp.
I lived in that camp, as a peon, for nearly three
years. My wife fared better than I did, as did the
wives of some of the other Negroes, because the
white men about the camp used these unfortu-
nate creatures as their mistresses. When I was
first put in the stockade my wife was still kept for
a while in the "Big House," but my little boy, who
was only nine years old, was given away to a
Negro family across the river in South Carolina,
and I never saw or heard of him after that. When
I left the camp my wife had had two children by
some one of the white bosses, and she was
living
in a fairly good shape in a little house off to her-
self. But the poor Negro women who were not in
the class with my wife fared about as bad as the
helpless Negro men. Most of the time the women
who were peons or convicts were compelled to
wear men's clothes. Sometimes, when I have seen
them dressed like men, and plowing or hoeing
or hauling logs or working at the blacksmith's
trade, just the same as men, my heart would
bleed and my
blood would boil, but I was power-
less to raise a hand. It would have meant death
on the spot to have said a word. Of the first six
women brought to the camp, two of them gave
birth to children after they had been there more
than twelve months and the babies had white
men for their fathers!
nigh
day
slee
ba:
The stockades in which we slept, were, I
believe, the filthiest places in the world. They
or
br
h
tDOCUMENT PROJECT
CHAPTER 9 Black Life and Culture during the Nadir
A Georgia Negro Peon The New Slavery in the South, 1904
This narrative first appeared in February 1904 in the New York magazine the Independent.
It was told to a representative of the magazine, who then prepared it for publication. The
narrative begins with a sharecropper and a storekeeper settling their account, which, not
surprisingly, comes out in the storekeeper's favor. Look for ways that peonage operated
differently.
as a system, paying particular attention to the ways it affected black men and women
1880-1915
war in Elbert County, Ga., and I reckon by this
am a negro and was born some time during the Really we had made ourselves lifetime slaves, or
peons, as the laws called us. But call it slavery,
peonage, or what not, the truth is we lived in
hell on earth what time we spent in the Senator's
time I must be a little over forty years old.
The storekeeper took us one by one and
read to us statements of our accounts. According
to the books there was no man of us who owed
the Senator less than $100; some of us were put
down for as much as $200. I owed $165, accord-
ing to the bookkeeper. These debts were not
accumulated during one year, but ran back for
three and four years, so we were told - in spite
of the fact that we understood that we had had a
full settlement at the end of each year. But no one
of us would have dared to dispute a white man's
word-oh, no; not in those days. Besides, we
fellows didn't care anything about the amounts
we were after getting away; and we had been told
that we might go, if we signed the acknowledge-
ments. We would have signed anything, just to
get away. So we stepped up, we did, and made
our marks. That same night we were rounded up
by a constable and ten or twelve white men, who
aided him, and we were locked up, every one of
us, in one of the Senator's stockades. The next
morning it was explained to us by the two guards
appointed to watch us that, in the papers we had
signed the day before, we had not only made
acknowledgement of our indebtedness, but that
we had also agreed to work for the Senator until
the debts were paid by hard labor. And from that
day forward we were treated just like convicts.
SOURCE: Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the
Negro People in the United States, vol. 2, From the Reconstruction
835-38.
Era to 1910, 5th ed. (New York: Citadel Press, 1970), 832,
—
a
1880-19
were ce
[sic] ye
that a
broug
twice
color
peon camp.
I lived in that camp, as a peon, for nearly three
years. My wife fared better than I did, as did the
wives of some of the other Negroes, because the
white men about the camp used these unfortu-
nate creatures as their mistresses. When I was
first put in the stockade my wife was still kept for
a while in the "Big House," but my little boy, who
was only nine years old, was given away to a
Negro family across the river in South Carolina,
and I never saw or heard of him after that. When
I left the camp my wife had had two children by
some one of the white bosses, and she was
living
in a fairly good shape in a little house off to her-
self. But the poor Negro women who were not in
the class with my wife fared about as bad as the
helpless Negro men. Most of the time the women
who were peons or convicts were compelled to
wear men's clothes. Sometimes, when I have seen
them dressed like men, and plowing or hoeing
or hauling logs or working at the blacksmith's
trade, just the same as men, my heart would
bleed and my
blood would boil, but I was power-
less to raise a hand. It would have meant death
on the spot to have said a word. Of the first six
women brought to the camp, two of them gave
birth to children after they had been there more
than twelve months and the babies had white
men for their fathers!
nigh
day
slee
ba:
The stockades in which we slept, were, I
believe, the filthiest places in the world. They
or
br
h
t1880-1915
The Lynching of Virgil Jones, Robert Jones,
Thomas Jones, and Joseph Riley, 1908
This postcard depicts the July 31, 1908, lynching of VIRGIL JONES, ROBERT JONES,
THOMAS JONES, and JOSEPH RILEY in Logan County, Kentucky. The message from the
sender reads, "This happened while I was in Kentucky in a little town just a short
distance from where I was stopping. The government won't allow the cards sent out
[the sender placed the postcard in an envelope to conceal its contents). A little nigger
shot a farmer & his wife and started the trouble. I was right in the heat of the
excitement." In reality, the men were probably lynched because they had publicly
criticized the legal system. The message on the postcard (left) documents an effort to
circumvent the federal ban on the mailing of lynching photographs. These materials
violated standards of public decency and damaged the public image of the South and
the nation. The image on the right is an enlarged detail from the postcard.
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Agency and Constraint
thout Sanctuary, National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA, USA.
PROJECTDOCUMENT PROJECT
CHAPTER 9 Black Life and Culture during the Nadir
The Lynching of Charles Mitchell, 1897
In June 1897, CHARLES MITCHELL, a twenty-three-year-old black hotel porter, was
accused of robbery by a prominent white woman in Urbana, Ohio; next she accused
him of rape. While he was in jail, a white mob gathered. The sheriff called
up
the
militia,
which fired into the crowd, killing several men and wounding others. The militia then
withdrew, evidently expecting the Ohio National Guard to arrive, but the mayor had
advised the guard to stay away. At that point, the mob broke into the jail, and the
sheriff handed over the keys to Mitchell's cell. A noose was placed around Mitchell's
neck, and he was hanged from a tree limb in the courthouse yard as shown below.
Later his corpse was displayed in a coffin under the lynching tree. Amid threats of
burning the body, it was removed, but not before relic hunters had "nearly cut the coat
off the dead man. Every button was gone, and even his shoes and stockings were taken
off and carried away." The New York Times reported that the "wounding of the jail
assailants arouses more local indignation than the murder of the Negro.381880-1915
Agency and Constraint
Congress
Henry White-the last black southerner of the slave-born generation to serve in
- introduced a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime. It failed to
pass. In 1918, with NAACP backing, Congressman Leonidas Dyer of St. Louis introduced a
times, nor any other antilynching bill ever passed Congress.
bill with the same intent. Neither the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, reintroduced numerous
Like lynching, peonage helped structure the white supremacist regime of the era.
Peonage was a notoriously vicious element in the South's repressive labor regime that
impoverished black agricultural workers while enriching white planters and merchants.
Defined as a "condition of compulsory service, based on the indebtedness of the peon
to the master,"36 it resulted when an agricultural worker signed a contract for her or his
labor but either failed to fulfill one or more requirements of the contract or, as was all
too often the case, was alleged to have done so. Especially if the individual had
received an advance on the promise of his or her labor, state laws made the worker
liable to arrest, fine, and imprisonment for charges of contract fraud. Vagrancy and
other ill-defined allegations also fed the chicanery that characterized this unjust
system. The worker might avoid imprisonment and have her or his fine paid by a third
party through a private labor agreement in which the worker agreed to work until the
debt was paid off. The problem was that the debt persisted. Often through technicalities
and trickery, the person who held the debt manipulated a set of practices ensuring
control over the labor of the debtor for as long as possible. It is no wonder that to debt
peons, their life and work felt like slavery. In fact, some historians have called it
neoslavery.³7 In addition to prison farms, which tended to operate outside public view,
a common form of highly visible convict labor that evoked slavery and ensnared many
blacks was chain gangs, in which prisoners shackled together by ankle chains did hard
public labor, like clearing land and building roads under strict armed surveillance. Work
gangs did similar kinds of labor under comparable surveillance, but without the ankle
chains.
DOCUMENT PROJECT
In Clyatt v. United States (1905), the first case challenging debt peonage, the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Peonage Abolition Act (1867) was constitutional.
More important, in Bailey v. Alabama (1911), a case that received secret support from
Booker T. Washington, the Court overturned an Alabama law that held a laborer crimi-
nally liable for taking money in advance for work not performed. This law, said the Court,
was in violation of both the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, and the
Fourteenth Amendment, which ensured equal protection of the laws. Finally, in United
States v. Reynolds (1914), the Court outlawed the criminal surety laws that had allowed
debtors to avoid prison by selling their labor to an employer who agreed to pay their
debts and fines.
As you examine the written and visual documents that follow, consider the
environment in which lynching and peonage were practiced. What did participants and
observers think of these events and systems? What role if any did gender play in limiting
African Americans'agency?DOCUMENT PROJECT
Agency and Constraint
According to one historical axiom, humans throughout history have lived their lives
within the limits imposed by the specific contexts they experience. They can and do
exercise agency, or purposeful action, in the struggle against the bounds of the worlds
within which they operate. Even though the tension between agency and constraint
shapes historical experience, ultimately constraints limit agency. African American
history in particular, especially the realities of African American freedom after emancipa-
tion, vividly illustrates this dynamic tension. While African Americans, notably freedpeople,
made remarkable progress at the turn of the twentieth century, it was also one of the
worst periods in African American freedom, in which white supremacy tragically
impeded black progress and devastated incalculable numbers of black lives.
Still, for African Americans specifically and for oppressed peoples generally, it is
essential to emphasize the complexity of their historical agency-in particular, what
they themselves have done historically and what they continue to do individually
and collectively to advance their liberation and alleviate racist oppression. In other
words, to understand what has happened and continues to happen to African
Americans is not enough: We also must understand what African Americans have
done and continue to do for themselves, paying special attention to the small and
large ways as well as the complex and simple ways they have fought for freedom and
resisted white supremacy.
Lynching functioned as a key mechanism in the violent repression of African
Americans in the decades after Reconstruction. Vigilante justice, in which people took
the law into their own hands and murdered individuals accused of crimes, had been
practiced by mobs in America since colonial times, and during Reconstruction the Ku
Klux Klan and similar groups lynched blacks as part of their terrorist campaigns. Those
who perpetrated lynchings said that the victims were criminals who got what they
deserved. Especially if the charge was a black man's assault on a white woman, lynching
was said to be necessary to spare the woman from the ordeal of giving courtroom
testimony. In the late nineteenth century, lynching reached epidemic proportions,
averaging two or three recorded episodes per week. They were often public spectacles,
drawing crowds of onlookers as well as participants. The setting was sometimes a
desolate, secluded place, but it was just as likely to be a public square, in front of the
local courthouse, with the sheriff and officers of the law among the crowd. Victims were
often tortured while alive, and after death their bodies were mutilated. Bystanders took
souvenirs and photographs of the event. Such photographs, affixed to postcards, were
often sent to friends and relatives until Congress forbade the mailing of such materials
in 1908.
The NAACP made a nationwide campaign against lynching a priority. In 1919, it
published an analysis of the dire situation titled Thirty Years of Lynching in the United
States. With each new report of a lynching, NAACP staff hung a banner out the window of
its New York City headquarters stating, "A man was lynched yesterday." In 1901, George
1880-1915
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