(2022) Third Place: Reconstructing Slave Labor: Prison Systems In The Jim Crow S
(2022) Third Place: Reconstructing Slave Labor: Prison Systems In The Jim Crow South
by Amanda Moorhouse
The Reconstruction Era began a revolutionary change in the United States and launched a significant chapter in American history, the start of the civil rights movement. The southern states were an agrarian economy and relied heavily on the use of slave labor for the production of cotton, rice, and tobacco. Following the end of the Civil War and emancipation of slaves, many white southerners began to fear that the agricultural economy of the South would collapse. Former Confederate states revised their existing slave laws into Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, enforcing labor contracts and racial segregation. Should any freedman fail to adhere to any of these laws they would be imprisoned and subsequently hired-out to work off their crime of being Black. After the abolition of slavery and the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Southern States began to develop new ways to recreate a slave society through the use of prisons and chain gangs.
The twelve years following the abolition of slavery, former slaves made great strides toward economic, social, and political growth. Historian Eric Foner described the progress as, “the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.”[1] Though seemingly emancipated from the bondage of slavery, the transformation into free laborers and equal citizens for Blacks was neither linear nor without strife. A coalition of white industrialists, businessmen, merchants, and planters known as Redeemers, sought to undo any promises of equality in the Reconstruction.[2] As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”[3] The efforts to keep Blacks subservient and racially inferior especially in the Post Bellum South, motivated southern whites to explore constitutional loopholes and profit in multiple capacities from the mass incarceration of black men, women, and children.
Southern States were economically motivated to imprison Blacks to work plantations, railways, and mines. Slavery made the agricultural-based economy of the Antebellum South a powerful force in the cotton market. The loss of the Civil War devastated the wealth of this cash crop and many others.[4] The Thirteenth Amendment made involuntary servitude a constitutional violation, with the exception of punishment for a crime. Exploiting this provision in the constitution came the birth of the convict leasing program through southern penal reform. Civil Rights advocate Jaron Browne observed that, “An extensive prison system was developed in the interest of maintaining the racial and economic relationship of slavery.”[5] With the aid of Redeemers and profiteering industrialists, a new way to continue economic growth from the bound