He is being punished because he "talked back" to the guard. He was left under the hot sun until he fainted. (Spivak Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas)
He is being punished because he "talked back" to the guard. He was left under the hot sun until he fainted. (Spivak Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas)
Despite the name “convict leasing,” the victims of this system were far from dangerous criminals. Those who were guilty had usually committed mere petty crimes. More often, innocent African-Americans were rounded up for allegedly violating the draconian “Black Codes” designed, immediately after slavery, to uphold white supremacy in the post-Civil War South.
Once “convicted” in a mockery of a trial, these individuals were rented by the state to do dangerous, backbreaking work for all their waking hours. They were fed almost nothing, lived in filthy and vermin-infested quarters and were beaten mercilessly for missing a work quota—only to be beaten again when they were too weak to meet the quota the next day. When they died, the businessmen would ask the state to send them another black man (who'd probably done nothing wrong) and the cycle would continue.
CONVICT LEASING
Decades after slavery was abolished, African-Americans toiled in bondage in Fort Bend County and all across Texas and the South, in a horrific system of forced labor known as convict leasing—slavery by another name. Few Americans know this story at all. Fewer still understand the grave injustice of a state sanctioned system expressly designed to work inmates to death solely to maximize profits for a small group of businessmen.
BOOKS
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Douglas A. Blackmon (2008)
Capital and Convict: Race, Region, and Punishment in Post-Civil War America
Henry Kamerling (2017)
25 Years Behind Prison Bars
Bill Mills (1938)
A New South Rebellion:
The Battle against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871-1896
Karin A. Shapiro (1998)
Black Prisoners and Their World: Alabama, 1865-1900
Mary Ellen Curtin (2000)
Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South
Talitha L. LeFlouria (2016)
The Wheel of Servitude: Black Forced Labor after Slavery
Daniel A. Novak (2014)
Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang
John L. Spivak (1932)
Incarcerated Women: A History of Struggles, Oppression, and Resistance in American Prisons
Erica Rhodes Hayden & Theresa R. Jach (2017)
Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South
Alex Lichtenstein (1996)
Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
David M. Oshinsky (1997)
Penology for Profit: A History of the Texas Prison System, 1867-1912
Donald R. Walker (2000)
No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
Sarah Haley (2016)
One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928
Matthew J. Mancini (1996)
Texas Tough
Robert Perkinson (2010)