PGCC History Agency and Constraint Lynching and Peonage labor Paper

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Chapter 9 Document Project : Agency and ConstraintPreview the document

Analyze and evaluate the ways in which the selected primary excerpts and images from pages 378-387 in the textbook reflects on the issues concerning lynching and peonage labor. In your one to two page paper, also include how this topic informs the political, cultural, and/or social issues of the United States.

With your paper, select a couple of themes or highlights that are of interest to you. Write about your thoughts, opinions, and/or anything that is confusing about the related themes. This is not a summary of the primary sources, but your viewpoint and critique of the subject matter.


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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. This happened while I ane ma little town. tucky. vishort distance fr Jai whe I sloppug sont. I he Godern ment. the cardssent out. A lett le neqqu shot a farmer & his Wife and started the trouble. The he Iwas reg + It happened. ty سمان است R. the excelemes at Ebensdelle Paul G hent 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 PEN GEAR Mechanical Pene Her Con 07 b t
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Running Head: LYNCHING AND PEONAGE LABOR

Lynching and Peonage labor
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LYNCHING AND PEONAGE LABOR

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Lynching and Peonage labor
Lynching occurs when a mob executes someone said to be a criminal. Lynching in the
United States was prevalent in the late 29th century and early twentieth century. It was the best
form of justice that the southern locals felt was befitting of African Americans who had been
accused of any crime. Lynching sometimes occurred in a secluded place, but sometimes it
happened in public places such as the front of the courthouse with the sheriff and officers being
part of the crowds (White, Bay, & Martin Jr, 2016). Some of the Lynched individuals include
Charles Mitchel, Vigil Jones, Thomas Jones, and Robert Jones among others. Lynching shows
how the southerners were v...


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