Slavery by Another Name: Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

“The South deluded itself with the illusion that the Negro was happy in his place; the North deluded itself with the illusion that it had freed the Negro. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slave, a legal entity, but it failed to free the Negro, a person.“ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Questions for Discussion Did anything in the documentary surprise you? Why isn’t the history of forced labor better known and broadly discussed? Why are some

parts of our history better known than others? When and how did you first learn that slavery, systems keeping people trapped in involuntary servitude and social compliance,

continued after the Civil War? Do you wish you had learned sooner? How might you better share this information with others? How did learning that slavery continued until World War II make you question or change your perspective on what you were previously

taught about the end of slavery and American life after the Civil War? Compare and contrast what you were previously taught with what you’ve learned. (continued)

United States Constitution 13th Amendment

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.

January 31, 1865

“[Freedmen] must be restrained from theft, idleness, vagrancy and crime, and taught the absolute necessity of strictly complying with their contracts for labor.… The labor of every negro in the State is needed… in menial occupations, it is very doubtful whether any laborers in this country or in Europe can supply his place.”

Governor James Orr, South Carolina, 1865

Black Codes in the post-war South were laws criminalizing common behaviors, and sometimes elevating misdemeanors to felonies, enforced primarily against black people. Activities for which a person might be sentenced to hard labor included:

Vagrancy, loosely defined to include such offenses as unemployment or idleness, inability to provide proof of current employment (such as a contract or cash), working a job not recognized by whites, seeking employment without permission of one’s current or previous owner/employer, failure to enter into a contract with a white employer by a particular date, leaving employment before the term of a contract ended, keeping a disorderly house, and failure to pay certain taxes.

Selling crops after sunset, or sales without proper licensing and authorization from white employers or local government authorities.

Renting property outside town or living in town (depending on location).

Unlawful assembly (could also apply to whites found with blacks).

Buying liquor, obscene speech, speaking loudly in the presence of a white woman, impudence or disobedience (especially toward an employer), gambling, walking at night without white supervision.

Walking along railroad lines or riding in empty freight cars.

Possession of, or carrying, a weapon.

Illegal voting.

Fornication, bigamy, adultery, miscegenation, and having children out of wedlock.

Black children of poor parents, parents convicted of vagrancy, or whose parents failed to exhibit “habits of industry and honesty,” could be forcibly apprenticed to whites, often the former owners of their families.

Even during the military occupation of Reconstruction, racist law enforcement was able to continue as long as the wording of laws remained somewhat race-neutral in appearance. As the will of the federal government to enforce civil rights for people of color waned and the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation, more explicitly racist laws returned and expanded.

Convict Leasing & Peonage Was a System of White Privilege Controlled black people either directly or by

terrorizing them into compliance with white supremacy.

Generated revenue for governments—millions of dollars in today’s money.

Provided cheap labor to private individuals and corporations who built wealth for generations to come.

Prevented free laborers of all races from collective organizing.

This era of neoslavery lasted, with very little interference, from the Civil War through World War II, at least 3 generations.

After watching the movie, can you think of popular culture references to the events portrayed (past or present) that you did not

previously associate with slavery? What are some of the ways white people tweaked and adapted race-based chattel slavery in order to keep systems of involuntary

servitude and racial control alive? Do you think they are being kept alive in new forms today? How? What connections do you see between the ideas, laws, and systems in Slavery by Another Name and today’s ideas, laws, and systems that uphold racism? Are there any laws now that you think unfairly target marginalized races or ethnic groups, even if they appear “neutral”?

By 1890, the South’s state prison population had soared to nearly 19,000 and nearly 90% of people incarcerated were black. People of

color are still disproportionately incarcerated today. Do you think there are any contemporary connections between the criminalization of black life and prison population rates?

What role did violence play in limiting the freedoms of black people? How is violence used today to control people? In what ways are profits valued before and above human people and their lives today? What systems and institutions reinforce this? What rights of citizenship were black people prevented from exercising in the era of neoslavery and under Jim Crow? How was this

accomplished? In what ways or circumstances are people prevented from exercising these and similar rights today? Many people acted as “voices of protest” against convict leasing and peonage. Do you have experience protesting? How can more people

be encouraged to join in protest? Why do you think it took so long for the federal government to take aggressive action against involuntary servitude? What can citizens do to pressure governments to act more quickly to change or enforce policy?

The Movement for Black Lives is demanding “reparations for the wealth extracted from black communities through environmental

racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination, and racialized capitalism in the form of corporate and government reparations focused on healing ongoing physical and mental trauma, and ensuring our access and control of food sources, housing, and land.” In what ways does the information in Slavery By Another Name support the case that harm requiring reparations has continued long after the Civil War?

Please join us Sunday, October 2, as we begin our discussion of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

More resources:

Listen to interviews about life under Jim Crow in Virginia at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/behindtheveil/Interview_State/Virginia.

Read about the effects of redlining and housing discrimination in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.

Learn more about the America’s “Great Migration” in Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns. Visit the ACLU’s collection of information about mass incarceration at https://www.aclu.org/issues/mass-incarceration. Support the Movement for Black Lives platform at https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/.

From a June 1903 report of federal prosecutor Warren Reese to the U.S. Attorney General, based on witness statements for federal peonage trials and reports of U.S. marshals: