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The total number of workers caught in these nets totaled hundreds of thousands—just in Alabama. In Georgia, at least the same. Elsewhere in the South, tens of thousands.
And instead of evidence showing Black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for utterly inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate African Americans— changing employers without permission, vagrancy, selling cotton after dark, walking along a rail lines, engaging in sexual activity—or loud talk—with white women.
As that system, initially created through the judicial system, came into place, it resurrected the old business mechanisms of slavery, of hardcore real slavery: a mix of people convicted
- some of them of a real crime and punished through forced labor - and armies of people convicted of entirely trivial or trumped up charges and then people kidnapped and offered for sale like James Robinson. A system of illegal human trafficking was resurrected in parallel to the system of judicial human trafficking.
Slavery By Another Name is unapologetically a challenge to the views of history that would deny or minimize that truth. It rejects any suggestion that, because slavery as a legally defined condition no longer existed, we cannot call the resubjugation of these African American families what it truly was: a new slavery.
Finding Carrie Kinsey’s letter to Teddy Roosevelt, back in 1903, was the single most arresting moment in the now more than twenty-five years that I have been pursuing this history. I first saw it in microfilm but I went to the National Archives to see it in person, to touch the actual piece of paper that Carrie Kinsey held. Two things affected me even more powerfully when I did that. One was the abject dismissal of her concerns by our system of justice. I could never determine the fate of her brother. But the fact that he disappeared from the historical record—as did Carrie herself—suggests terrifying possibilities.
Even more staggering, though, was that Carrie’s letter was in one folder, in a box on a shelf. And in the same box were a half dozen other letters with almost equally chilling stories. And on either side of that box, were a half dozen more boxes. And on the shelf above and the shelf below. And the next aisle and the aisle after that. More than 30,000 pages of such letters and cases. All filled with descriptions of absolute terrorism perpetrated by the people empowered to enforce justice. And the same desperate pleas for help. Help which never came.
Without an honest and full understanding of what happened in that era and how sharply it shaped the world we live in today, we will never fully understand ourselves as Americans, no matter what our colors are.
It is the story of all of us. Of things done by Americans to Americans. It is our shared history, owned by no person or group. We must know it. And we must teach this honestly to our children.
The one thing we cannot do is pass down to our children the lies that were passed down to us.
J. Cal Mayo, Jr. Oxford, MS
Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests were more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of Black aspirations. Where mob violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black citizens periodically, the return of forced labor as a fixture in Black life ground pervasively into the daily lives of millions of African Americans.
By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfig- ured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of Af- rican Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of white people. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all Af- rican Americans throughout the region.
Revenues from this neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina—where more than 75% of the American Black population then lived. The sale of prisoners for labor became the state of Alabama’s single largest source of revenue.
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