A Captive Workforce: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans (2019)
“The system of neoslavery, which persisted into the early years of World War II, explains more about contemporary American life, white and black, than antebellum slavery. Neoslavery was even more brutal. Under the old system, a chattel slave was the owner’s property. Having made a considerable investment in a black human being, the enslaver had an economic interest in preserving that investment by upholding minimal standards of nutrition and health. Under the new system, convicts were not owned but merely leased by state prisons to private corporations that mined coal, forged steel, or built bricks. In some Alabama prison camps the mortality rate was 40 percent. If a convict died from malnutrition, lashing, overwork, or disease, the corporation could always get another. The price was trivial for the business owner, though the revenue was crucial for government coffers in states notoriously unwilling to levy taxes. Besides, the workers in question were criminals, weren’t they?
Blackmon’s devastating research shows they were not. Most were arrested under deliberately obscure vagrancy laws, according to which black persons unable to immediately prove they were currently employed by a white person could be charged, convicted, and sentenced to hard labor. Offenses such as spitting, selling produce after dark, walking next to a railroad, and talking loudly near a white woman could also result in prison terms. Under the new laws, it was no accident that 90 percent of prisoners in Southern jails were African American. Rather than reflecting on the legitimacy of the laws, however, most whites used the rise in African American crime rates to argue that blacks were inherently criminal. The resulting image of African Americans was even worse than it had been under antebellum slavery: people who’d been formerly viewed as loyal, albeit inferior, were now seen as dangerous. The increasing number of blacks in jail was used to support the old argument that they were not yet ready for freedom. In fact, Blackmon showed that the timing and scale of arrests were repeatedly correlated with the demand for cheap labor. Just before harvest time, for example, the number of arrests increased dramatically.
State officials responsible for arrests and convictions cooperated closely with the businesses to which convicts were leased. In some cases, business and law were controlled by the same person. Rounding up black men, and occasionally women, and putting them in the chains from which their parents were so recently freed served two purposes well. Along with the fear of lynching, fear of arrest kept Southern black people in a permanent state of intimidation. Many who were seized and sentenced never saw their families again, despite those families’ appeals to federal authorities for help in finding the prisoners. Convict leasing was as effective a means of enforcing white supremacy as any ever devised.
The other purpose of the convict lease system was even more far-reaching. The growth of convict leasing coincided directly with the growth of the international labor movement. Access to a limitless supply of dirt-cheap labor allowed business to depress wages for free workers, break early strikes, and suppress the drive for unionization in the South. Southern business literally had a captive workforce.”—Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019)
