1

Summary Notes on African American Labor in the Post-Reconstruction Period

Summary Statement: Land was both a symbol of freedom and citizenship and the guarantee of independence in the period following Emancipation. However, notwithstanding the promises of Emancipation and Reconstruction including, righting of the economic inequities and providing economic opportunities, black Americans faced landlessness, unemployment and underemployment. Between l877 and well into the twentieth century several systems of labor came to dominate the lives of African-Americans. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century 90% of the 6.5 million U.S. blacks lived in the South. Land was not the only right or opportunity taken away from African-Americans during these crucial years in the Souththe very right to freedom was denied many because of sharecropping, convict lease, peonage, and other forms of forced labor. The Sharecropping System:

As blacks lost their struggle for landownership, especially in the Deep South, they turned to sharecropping as an alternative to rural wage labor. In exchange for access to small family plots they sought to cultivate this land independently with their own family. Along with this small plot of land they expected to receive access to tools, seed, and fertilizer, plus food, housing, other supplies, and a substantial proportion of the final crop. Depending on how much they received from landowners upfront, crop shares could vary from 1/3 to 1/2 for the black worker, with the remainder going to the landowner to cover supplies, rent, and debts to merchants and bankers. During Radical Reconstruction (1865-1877) the government in many states protected the rights of the black farmer under these arrangements. Indeed, some were viewed as partner rather than an employee in the production process. With the overthrow of Reconstruction and the abandonment of the South to a new and more vicious class of whites, the new southern governments went as far as they could without actually re-establishing slavery.

They strengthened the hands of the landowners and weakened the bargaining position of black farmers. They extended or reinstituted the vagrancy, anti-enticement, and convict laws. More importantly they re-established the superiority of the landlord and merchant claims to their proportion of the crop over the workers share. North Carolinas Landlord and Tenant Act of l877 set the pattern for what became a common Southern phenomenon: placing full authority over the crop and financial settlement in the hands of the planters. In other words making the landlord court, sheriff, and jury. The net result was to take a hopeful system, where the black worker with little money but valuable labor and redefine the sharecropper no longer as a partner, but only a wage earner. The system now deteriorated into an exploitive system that dashed any hopes of African Americans becoming an independent yeoman. Planters now regularly fixed the books at the end of the year keeping blacks in perpetual debt. By l900 African-Americans owned a smaller percentage of land in the cotton belt than they had owned in 1877, but the amount of land owned by blacks had increased to an estimated 12 million acres. Still, nearly 80% of southern blacks worked as sharecroppers or cash tenants on land owned by whites. When African-Americans resisted the sharecroppings form of injustice they quit, prompting Southerners to use vagrancy laws providing for the employment of convicts by private employers. Convict Lease The convict least system rerouted blacks into the plantation system on worse terms than under slavery. The life of a convict was expendable. The vast majority of prisoners leased out died. In Mississippi, during the convict lease period, no convict leased to the chain gang lived more than seven years. Convict lease was highly profitable and provided an unlimited source of free labor to any and all Southern industries as it struggled to keep pace with the industrialized North at the turn of the century. Leased by state private interests they did not have to bear the long term cost of the labor and could lease them for a specific season, amount of money and could even sub-lease them.

The black crime rate fluctuated according to production seasons. Consequently, during planting season, or the start of a major public work project, a mythical crime wave would arise and result in the mass arrest of blacks as were needed to fill the ranks. The convict lease system was rooted in racist laws, and made possible by the collusion of law makers, law enforcement, and local industry. It was profitable for many years despite rising disgust and outrage. Using convict lease labor the South was rebuilt through enormous public works projects, railroads were laid, coal mined, and turpentine tapped in Louisiana. As the nation geared up for World War I all of the raw materials needed were supplied by corporations that relied on mostly Southern convict labor to do the deadly work without pay. During the second decade of the 20th century convict lease came under fire from humanitarians who exposed the death, disease and cruelty that dominated the system. Oregon was the first state to abolish convict lease and Alabama was the last in l928. Florida ended the Convict lease system after the brutal death of convict Martin Talbert became national news. Even when states officially abolished the practice it continued and declined slowly with the decreased demand for turpentine after World War II. Today many individuals protest the state governments turning over the prison system to privatization, fearing that a for profit penal system will revive many of the old abuses of convict lease. Peonage

At the turn of the twentieth century the federal government acknowledged that the maze of local customs and laws which bound men in debt was peonage. The practice had been abolished by an 1867 federal statute aimed at abolishing a similar system in New Mexico, outlawing debt servitude. Even Booker T. Washington recognized the pernicious practice when he remarked in l888 that the, colored people on these plantations are in a kind of slavery that is i n one sense as bad as the slavery of antebellum days. Still as Pete Daniels says in The Shadow of Slavery Peonage in the South, peonage defeated righteous men, withstood them, and endured.

African-Americans defrauded of their wages and deprived of mobility either by threats that they could not legally move until their debts were paid or by actual force, lived in the vortex of peonage. Like convict lease and sharecropping, peonage had deep roots in history and in Southern custom; it reflected the extreme manifestation of the social, legal, and economic ills of the South. Public support of peonage made any investigation difficult and convictions rare. By l920 each Southern state was enmeshed in a web of virtually countless cases and complaints by blacks to the federal government. The line that distinguished peonage from sharecropper came when the planter forbade the cropper from leaving the plantation because of debt. Peonage victims could not appeal to law enforcement for help because Southern law was indistinguishable from the lawless people. County sheriffs, constables, justices of the peace, and sometimes federal officials aided and abetted preserving the nightmare of peonage. The first case that worked to end peonage was Clyatt v. United States (1904). Ironically it involved a white turpentine planter, J.O. Evington who threatened to kill a recently arrived white European immigrant to Florida (George Huggins) if he did not return to the plantation where he still owed him forty dollars. Fred Cubberly, a U.S. Commissioner stationed in Florida became interested in the incident because he had heard such things regularly happened in the South. Clubberly was informed a group of men from Georgia, led by Samuel M. Clyatt had come to Florida to make an example of several white men who had left his plantation while still owing him debt for wages and unfulfilled laborreturning them his plantation. Clubberly was determined to make Clyatt a test case of the Constitutionality of the 1867 federal statute outlawing peonage. Though Clubberly and George Huggins had mysteriously disappeared, in Clyatt v. United States (l904) the Court upheld the lower courts conviction of Clyatt. In its decision it said of peonage, It may be defined as a status or condition of compulsory service, based upon the indebtedness of the peon to the master. The basal fact is indebtedness. The Court made the distinction between voluntary performance of labor and peonage. The debtor, though contracting to pay his indebtedness by labor or service, and subject like any other contractor, to an action for damages of breach of that contract, can elect at any time to break it, and no law compels performance or a continuance of service.

Forced labor was also attacked in Bailey v. Alabama (1911). This case involved Alonzo Bailey, an African-American who had obtained fifteen dollars from a corporation on a written agreement to work for a year at 12 dollars a month; $10.75 to be paid to Bailey and $ 1.25 per month applied to his debt. Within a month he quit and was convicted, fined $30 for default, sentenced to hard labor for 20 days in lieu of the fine, and an additional 116 days on account of costs. Alabama had a false pretenses law that read if a laborer signed a contract and obtained an advance intending fraud, then left his job without repaying the money, he could be punished as if he had stolen it. Numerous Southern states had enacted such a law: Georgia, Florida and several other states. Under Alabamas rule of evidence, it absolutely prohibited testimony from the laborer indicted under this law, making conviction under the contractlaw almost certain. In l911 the Supreme Court declared the Alabama law unconstitutional based on the 13th Amendment and the Act of l867. The Court ruled that the case rested on fraud. There was not a particle of evidence he had made the contract with the intent to injure or defraud his employer. He had even shown good faith working for a month. Because Bailey could not testify he was stripped by the statute of the presumption of innocence, and exposed to conviction for fraud upon evidence only of breach of contract and failure to pay. The state, the court argued, could not compel one man to labor for another in payment of a debt by punishing him as a criminal if he does not perform the service or pay the debt. Three years later in U.S. v. Reynolds (1914) the Supreme Court held unconstitutional an Alabama law that allowed an employer to take a man from jail after paying his fine and work him as a prisoner. Despite the Bailey decision many agricultural workers continued to be forced to work as peons. One of the most tragic cases was the l921 trial of John Williams, of Jasper County, Georgia for the killing of 18 black peons to escape prosecution for peonage. During the flood of l927 blacks were held as peons, forced to work to save white land from the ravages of the flood. Even though laws continually struck down peonage. As late as the l980s federal courts were filled with cases in which individuals charged they were held as peons. Most of the cases now involved Hispanics, rather than African-Americans.