Page 51 - ACTL Journal_Sum24

The Democratic Party already had a long White Supremacist history.ButnowtheGOP,thepartyofLincoln,alsoabandoned its commitment to the equality of African Americans. Legally required segregation spread across the nation.
The general white public, national leadership, and the federal government on every level were arriving at the conclusion that African Americans did not merit full citizenship and that their genuine freedom simply was not worth the cost of imposing a racial morality that few in any region of the country genuinely shared. What came in the wake of that was the greatest period of lynchings and mass violence by white mobs stretching across the country—from the Deepest South to Chicago to New England to Tulsa and beyond.
In all those events—the parties who most failed the American republic were law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and private attorneys who, at worst, were the principal agents of that system, and at best, turned a blind eye to it.
Slavery by Another Name is a story that, until recently, few Americans knew, understood, or had ever heard of. We have only just now begun to fully understand the width and breadth and venality of all that was done to harm African Americans in that period, in ways that still vividly shape the contours of millions of lives and our society even today.
No one would deny that bad things were done to Black Americans in the era before the Civil Rights Movement. But the conventional interpretation—and the way it was long taught (if at all) of the era when Green Cottenham and James Robinson were young men—has been to view the events of the early 20th century as a series of disconnected “bad habits” of unreconstructed white southerners.
Dissertations were written on peonage, sharecropping, prison labor, antebellum industrial slavery, racial violence, political intimidation, the lack of schools, the rise of white supremacy, the chain gang. Each of these things were often treated by historians as separate phenomena—to be sliced and diced and analyzed by regions and periods of time—in ways that inadvertently but consistently minimize the totality of what was in fact a highly organized terroristic regime of coercion against African-Americans.
There was also an almost universal acceptance of the old story about how formerly enslaved people and their early descendants supposedly had been unprepared for freedom. And they engaged in widespread crime and violence that triggered some of the brutal actions of whites. That’s what I was taught in my 9th grade State History class back home in the Mississippi Delta.
Most consistently overlooked, even by serious historians, has been the centrality of forced labor in the web of restrictions put in place to suppress Black citizenship and the vast number of African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal—and tainted—local courts. The laws passed to intimidate Black men away from political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or forced labor camps. The judges and sheriffs who sold convicts to giant corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans to local farmers and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to acquire still more Black laborers directly from their courtrooms.
The failure to see how all these things were intricately related came partly from simply a failure to tap untouched evidence, but also because this challenges key pillars of American mythology—such as that Abraham Lincoln successfully ended slavery. Or that maybe life wasn’t so bad under segregation. Or perhaps that white people—and their leaders and judges and lawyers and police officers--didn’t really intend all this. That it just happened. That it was no one’s fault.
Many historians once accepted a presumption that it would be impossible to find that evidence. I was often told that there was just no way to determine the legitimacy of the arrests of dozens of men and women convicted of obscure misdemeanors in a mass court proceeding and then sold into a coal mine owned by U.S. Steel Corporation, or when thousands of schoolboys were rounded up by sheriffs and compelled into white farmers’ cotton fields during picking season. How could that ever be clearly figured out after the passage of so much time?
I couldn’t accept that. And as I started moving from one rural courthouse to another, across Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida, trying to find answers, I discovered tens of thousands of pages of original records and court and business accounts, untouched for most of a century. They paint a picture not of waves of crime by former enslaved people and their descendants, but of the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process.
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Where’s the evidence for all of this? Fair question.