Interesting & Civil discussion re: slavery from Greek Life is HERE
 

Since the other thread looks like it's going to be locked, I'm cutting and pasting my last big post from there here, it was a response to SEC. Those that had posts after mine, feel free to also cut and paste here and let's continue the discourse. Man, god forbid we discuss real issues here and not just Rock of Love, huh? ...o'er the la-and of the freeeeeee.... :rolleyes: :mad:

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It "just brings to light the mistreatment of prisoners after slavery was abolished"???? Did you read the same article? Do you not get that what it's documenting is that even decades after slavery was abolished, the state and private enterprise continued to find and force ways to enslave african americans? The point was that since "slavery" was illegal, they would simply arrest them so they could call them "prisoners" and then justify the continued used of them as slave labor. And are you REALLY comparing the reality of this to the Hollywood depiction in a Paul Newman film???? Did you see the picture of the man tied around the pick-axe in the slide show? That was real.

You must have just skimmed the article, so let me pull some highlights for you: "were arbitrarily detained" ; "Others were simply seized by southern landowners and pressed into years of involuntary servitude."
"At the turn of the 20th century, at least 3,464 African-American men and 130 women lived in forced labor camps in Georgia"
"vivid accounts of the system's brutalities" ; "Wraithlike men infected with tuberculosis were left to die on the floor of a storage shed" ; "Laborers who attempted escape from the Muscogee Brick Co. were welded into ankle shackles with three-inch-long spikes turned inward -- to make it impossibly painful to run again. Guards everywhere were routinely drunk and physically abusive."
"hellish conditions at Chattahoochee Brick and other operations owned by Mr. English, a luminary of the Atlanta elite" ; "But by 1908, Mr. English -- despite having never owned antebellum slaves -- was a man whose great wealth was inextricably tied to the enslavement of thousands of men."
"The base of his wealth, Chattahoochee Brick, relied on forced labor from its inception"
"Once dried, the bricks were carried at a double-time pace by two dozen laborers running back and forth -- under almost continual lashing by Mr. English's overseer, Capt. James T. Casey. Witnesses testified that guards holding long horse whips struck any worker who slowed to a walk or paused"
"A string of witnesses told the legislative committee that prisoners at the plant were fed rotting and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects, driven with whips into the hottest and most-intolerable areas of the plant, and continually required to work at a constant run in the heat of the ovens."
"On Sundays, white men came to the Chattahoochee brickyard to buy, sell and trade black men as they had livestock and, a generation earlier, slaves on the block."
"after a black prisoner named Peter Harris said he couldn't work because of a grossly infected hand, the camp doctor carved off the affected skin tissue with a surgeon's knife and then ordered him back to work. Instead, Mr. Harris, his hand mangled and bleeding, collapsed after the procedure. The camp boss ordered him dragged into the brickyard and whipped 25 times. "If you ain't dead, I will make you dead if you don't go to work," shouted a guard. Mr. Harris was carried to a cotton field. He died lying between the rows of cotton."
"Guards there had recently adopted for punishment of the workers the "water cure," in which water was poured into the nostrils and lungs of prisoners. (The technique, preferred because it allowed miners to "go to work right away" after punishment, became infamous in the 21st century as "waterboarding.")"
"a 16-year-old boy at a lumber camp owned by Mr. Hurt and operated by his son George Hurt ... The teenager was serving three months of hard labor for an unspecified misdemeanor... "one of the bosses, up in a pine tree and he had his gun and shot at the little negro and shot this side of his face off"... The teenager ran into the woods and died. Days later, a dog appeared in the camp dragging the boy's arm in its mouth, Mr. Gaither said. The homicide was never investigated. Called to testify before the commission, Mr. Hurt lounged in the witness chair, relaxed and unapologetic for any aspect of the sprawling businesses."

They weren't "servants", it was "debt slavery". From the article:
Then came Pearl Harbor and suddenly everyone panicked that the (known) mistreatment of black Americans could be exploited against the U.S.:
So, ultimately, the federal government was forced to finally put teeth behind the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and protect black americans from any form of indentured servitude because of fear of bad P.R. during World War II. Oh, and because they needed them to fight for the U.S. in the armed forces, too.



ETA: Here's the post with the story links I'd put in the other thread:
SEC (and others that are interested): Please read: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1206...iews_days_only -- and be sure to watch the slideshow -- and: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1206...2:r1:c0.328393

I appreciate your interest in this question, but I actually don't feel qualified to define it.

Actually I think this Wikipedia Template helps to give a sense of the numerous types of enslavement/involuntary labor. Also it creates a distinction between slavery and unfree labor... I actually think the Wikipedia definition of slavery is not too bad...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Slavery

LOL. Me too.

I started another thread over in News & Politics if anyone wants to pick up their ball and go over there with me... :rolleyes:

http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...ad.php?t=95036

And now back to your regularly scheduled scintillating discussion.

Here's my post in response to nittanyalum's post from the other thread:

The point being that slavery after 1865 was usually called by names other than "slavery" (for obvious reasons). In fact it was often called "servitude" or "captivity" or "emprisonment." Or they would even claim their slaves as family members and use that to justify the enslavement and the slaves' inability to leave. James Brooks's work makes this very clear, although he's working on very different forms of slavery in the southwest and not on the material you've brought up.

I'm willing to recognize that there is a semantic issue here, right? So the people who were enslaving in this period didn't call what they were doing slavery for a variety of reasons, but we can recognize that it was, in fact, slavery. We do this today pretty frequently. For example, we call child soldiers in Africa slaves even though their masters don't speak of them that way. I do think it's important, however, to recognize the difference in words and think about how differences in words affected the reality of people's lives... I do think language matters even if we want to constantly speak truth to power. Even if we all decided ultimately to call it "captivity" and not "slavery" (which James Brooks uses semi-interchangeably in his book), we can all recognize that it was a pretty great evil... I hope.

FTW.

My sorority chapter (Pi Phi at W&L) used to host the Virginia Tech Pi Phis pretty frequently! It was fun! But our chapters had a lot in common! Yay Pi Phi!

:confused:

What is the point of making any of these statements? How do they benefit the proper GC community? They are just as incendiary as any other ignorant and asinine and puerile comments made from people whose lives need to interact more than just typing on a computer...

I feel rejected as a person and I feel attacked and abused.

:confused:

I don't know where any attack was made. We've been discussing different forms of slavery.

AKAMonet, I'm sorry, it didn't occur to me that anyone who hadn't been tracking the "Visiting Chapters" thread in the Greek Life forum would have NO IDEA where this thread came from.

Dive into that thread here: http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...t=94834&page=8 and start reading forward ... the thread started off being about fraternity chapters visiting each other and then just started taking left turn after left turn. It turned into some pretty healthy discourse and I think has been surprisingly civil and educational (for the most part).

But then a Greek Life mod came in and started making noise about shutting it down if it didn't get back to the OP, which was a distant memory by then.

So since our freedom of speech was hampered there ;), we scurried over here to the news & politics forum where the discussion could be continued, if folks wished. But I can see now how abrupt the posts coming in that were deep in the conversation over there would seem strange kind of coming out of nowhere over here. Sorry for the blindside!

LOL. :p

slight disagreement....thought can be exported...it's called 'media exposure'

IRON-KNEE. IDIOT.

Can we have all of these posts moved there?

I would hate for people (like that idiot Elephant Walk) to come in at the tail end of what was an informative discussion and ask things that have already been covered.

I think this discussion has lost its steam, anyway, and most of the "juicy" stuff has been covered.

Coincidentally, interesting discussions really only happen on GC as a result of a thread hijack. GCers seem to run away from threads that are created to discuss such things.

Haha, I like how the apparent thread starter is me...........and how my OP says "You've lost it pal".