I maybe could have expressed myself a little better inasmuch as I don’t know if the kids I referred to wore shoes at home. It was a fairly common practice for kids to wear shoes to church and to school but not at home. Since these kids lived out in the country while I lived in town, I never saw them at home.
A good example of what happens when no one feels like enforcing a law.
Slavery is possibly the only thing that our government failed to compromise on. Part of the country didn’t have representation in Congress when the 13th amendment was passed. It’s no surprise that it didn’t end with a simple amendment.
Quite possible. My dad doesn’t like to talk about it, but when he had a few one night he went on with his sisters about how humiliating it was to go to church and to school with no shoes. He was born in 31, in Nowhere Particular, GA. (They moved around a lot - Baker County, Mitchell County, thereabouts. We had a little argument with a passport official once because it has his place of birth as Mitchell County and they wanted a city. There wasn’t one!)
Well, “slavery” is a kind of catchall term. ranging from contract slavery, to debt bondage, to chattel slavery. Sharecropping or tenant farming isn’t chattel slavery, sure, but some of the ways it was carried out in the US was pretty similar to contract slavery.
I’m pretty sure that the US courts would interpret the 8th Amendment to bar sentencing someone to be a slave as cruel and unusual punishment.
My understanding is that the majority of cases of modern slavery are debt bondage.
Considering other historic milestones, like integrating schools and giving blacks the vote, I wouldn’t be surprised. Various loopholes etc. kept them enslaved—if not officially, then unofficially.
In 1957, in the wake of the Brown v. Board decision, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower enforced the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation order by sending US Army troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to protect the “Little Rock Nine” students’ entry to school. Governor Orval Faubus had mobilized troops from the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students’ entry. Eisenhower federalized the National Guard, as he had the authority to do, and also used the US Army to ensure that the federal mandate was carried out at Little Rock Central High School.
In southern American states before the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, literacy and other tests were used to disenfranchise African-Americans.
White prisoners were farmed out for contract labor with the same frequency as black ones were. How is this a racial thing?
It probably fell disproportionately on black prisoners. At least that appears to be the author’s point - that the American criminal justice system has historically been unfair to black men. I don’t think there’s going to be too many people who will be surprised by this revelation.
The first time I lived in Florida, back in 1966, chain gangs were still a common sight. In urban areas, the chains were missing but there were still shotgun toting guards on horseback. Out in the boondocks, though, the chains were still in use, or so I was told. I never actually saw any. Anyway, the gangs that I did see were composed of blacks and whites; neither color seemed to be disproportionately represented.
Back in the 1950’s my grandfather’s brother did three years’ time on a Florida farm as a contracted prison laborer. He was, however, Irish, not black
But wait! There might yet be hope for those who would choose to believe the ”Slavery continued” fallacy. He might have been one of the so-called Black Irish! That would save the day, right?
Oddly, lots of Arabs are convinced slavery continued in the US until Martin Luther King freed Black people. I blame the schools.
Arabs are probably the last people who should be talking about slavery at all. Their predations in Africa in the 19th century made America look positively philanthropic.
Cite?
In Georgia in 1878, out of 1,239 leased convicts, 1,124 were African-American.
This may come as a surprise to you, but the administration of justice in the late Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century South (and North, for that matter) was not exactly color-blind. (Do we even have to argue this point?) Dark-skinned persons were more likely to be commit manufactured crimes such as “vagrancy” and “selling crops at a deadfall”, more likely to be arrested, less likely to be able to afford good legal representation, more likely to be convicted, less likely to be granted leniency in sentencing, and more likely to be leased out for the harshest convict labor.
As pointed out in One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928–the most thorough study of convict leasing before the Blackmon book–even when whites were leased out, conditions were not always as brutal: