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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Originally Posted by SECdomination http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/im...s/viewpost.gif
From the first link:
"Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands were arbitrarily detained, hit with high fines and charged with the costs of their arrests. With no means to pay such debts, prisoners were sold into coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroad construction crews and plantations. Others were simply seized by southern landowners and pressed into years of involuntary servitude"
There is no further description of these laws in the excerpt. It just brings to light the mistreatment of prisoners after slavery was abolished. The Wall Street Journal is much more credible than most publications, but all the article talks about is the mistreatment and not the laws that put them in jail in the first place.
The slideshow didn't look that bad. Have you seen the movie "Cool Hand Luke"?
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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."
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Originally Posted by SECdomination:
The second article was interesting. It had many more useful facts than the first. But I don't understand how you could hold servants against their will. Did officials look the other way because this was taking place in the south?
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They weren't "servants", it was "debt slavery". From the article:
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...the peonage system -- which allowed farmers to use bogus debts and the threat of violence to keep workers on their land indefinitely -- hung over millions of African-Americans. ... Although the antebellum version of slavery had been unconstitutional for decades, there still existed no federal statute that made holding slaves a punishable crime.
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Then came Pearl Harbor and suddenly everyone panicked that the (known) mistreatment of black Americans could be exploited against the U.S.:
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President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed to advisors his worry that the mistreatment of blacks would be used in propaganda by Japan and Germany to undercut support for the war by African-Americans.
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Attorney General Francis Biddle shared the president's concerns with his top assistants. Mr. Biddle was informed that federal policy had long been to cede virtually all allegations of slavery to local jurisdiction -- effectively guaranteeing they would never be prosecuted.
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Mr. Biddle said that in an all-out war, in which millions of African-Americans would be called upon to serve, the U.S. government needed to take a stand: Those who continued to practice any form of slavery, in violation of 1865's Thirteenth Amendment, had to be prosecuted as criminals.
Five days after the Japanese attack, on Dec. 12, 1941, Mr. Biddle issued a directive -- Circular No. 3591 -- to all federal prosecutors acknowledging the history of unwritten federal policy to ignore most reports of involuntary servitude.
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In August 1942, a letter from a 16-year-old black boy arrived at the Department of Justice alleging that Charles Bledsoe -- the Alabama man who had received a $100 fine for peonage -- still was holding members of the teen's family against their will. Despite Mr. Biddle's strong directive, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initially saw no need to pursue the matter. The U.S. attorney in Mobile, Ala., Francis H. Inge, was similarly uninterested.
"No active investigation will be instituted," Mr. Hoover wrote to Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge.
But seven months into World War II, with the nation anxious to mobilize every possible soldier and counter every thrust of Japan's and Germany's propaganda machines, Mr. Berge directed Mr. Hoover to look further. ... "Enemy propagandists have used similar episodes in international broadcasts to the colored race, saying that the democracies are insincere and that the enemy is their friend," Mr. Berge continued.
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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