Awareness Wednesday :: Black History Month — Are You Aware of Labor?
“For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee.” Psalm 128:2
America was founded on slavery. Most people in North America prior to 1776 labored and did not reap the benefits. The vast majority of the people in the colonies were African slaves. The economy of the British colonies was dependent on the labor of slaves. In fact, in the Americas there were five times as many Africans as white Europeans. About one million Europeans settled in the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1776; 5.5 million Africans were brought here.
During the colonial period, the most important crop was tobacco. The tobacco plantations of Virginia and Maryland utilized the largest percentage of slave labor. The cotton gin changed everything. Invented in 1793, it allowed cotton to be processed much more quickly, and a larger harvest was needed to feed the machines. The number of slaves working on cotton plantations ballooned to about 1.8 million. When it was said that “cotton was king,” the kings were the plantation owners. The kings were the bankers who financed the operations. The kings were the northern mill owners who made the fabrics. The kings were the shipping industrialists who fed Europe’s insatiable desire for cotton cloth. The slaves were bought and sold and used as collateral for loans to buy machinery, land, and yet more slaves. Slavery was a machine — an economic engine.
Slaves were also used like machines. Despite the prevalence of images of the Antebellum South as a picturesque land of happy slaves toiling under the loving gaze of their masters, slavery was brutal. Slaves were beaten, starved, and worked to death. It is amazing that we still call them plantations — they were work camps.
After the Civil War, America’s caste system of four social classes became more apparent. The wealthy land and factory owners were on top. They were followed by skilled professionals, such as doctors and lawyers. Then came former African slaves, who were more often than not skilled laborers such as farm workers, carpenters, cooks, and laundresses. In the Southern states, the lowest social rung was occupied by poor whites. Poor whites and freed slaves jockeyed for social status. Many of the poor whites were unemployed during the period of slavery, since slaves were providing the needed labor — unpaid. Poor white people often were incarcerated for mischievous behaviors such as vagrancy and drinking. Keri Leigh Merritt writes in A Dual Emancipation: How Black Freedom Benefited Poor Whites, “The swift change in the race of the typical southern convict—overwhelmingly white during slavery, overwhelmingly black after emancipation—meant that impoverished whites were no longer the primary targets of the criminal justice system.”
From 1884 until 1928 many Southern states practiced convict leasing. They found that rather than pay to house and feed their prisoners, it was more economical to lease them to private concerns such as mines, factories, and farms. The conditions for leased convicts were rarely much better than those of slaves. To ensure the flow of free labor, laws known as Black Codes were enforced. These laws placed heavy fines on black people who committed “crimes,” such as being unemployed. More than 200,000 people were leased convicts during this time. Many died from the conditions they endured. However, the factory, mine, and farm owners became quite wealthy.
When convict leasing was eventually abolished, a new form of free labor was created: the chain gang. In this iteration, convicts were forced to work, doing tasks such as road construction and other building projects for state or local governments. These mostly black work crews — leased convicts or chain gangs — did work that poor whites would have been willing to do for pay. This created even more tension between the races. Chain gangs would continue until 1941.
Today in America there is a ballooning prison population. Prisoners are still being made to work for virtually nothing. They can do regular prison jobs such as maintenance and cooking for a range of 0 to 2 dollars per hour. Sometimes they can work for prison industries that manufacture items such as license plates, office furniture, braille textbooks, and American flags. The best jobs in prisons are often much like convict leasing — working for private corporations. Some of the companies that have capitalized off this cheap labor pool include Victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, and Microsoft. The value of goods produced in prisons in 2004 was more than 2 billion dollars. In California, at least 30% of the firefighters trying to control the wildfires earned 1 dollar per hour, because they were prisoners.
Just as it was in the Antebellum South, free labor is now benefitting the top tier of society. Prisons (private and state) are funded by the government to house predominantly poor people. Private corporations are paid to provide services to prisons, such as food services, prisoner telephone services, and even medical services. This is while prisoners are forced (in some states work is called rehabilitation, and one can be punished for failure to work) to work for pennies to create goods and provide services. In many communities where factories have closed, the work has moved not overseas as many would guess, but into the prisons. The increase in manufacturing in prisons has decimated the economy for unskilled and semi-skilled laborers. In this way, prison has fueled the division between the lower classes. This division, crafted by history, has become a part of the race narrative.
We built an economy on slavery. Then, with the passage of a single amendment, we abolished slavery and reinvented it in the form of convict leasing, chain gangs, and prison labor.
U.S. Constitution Amendment XIII: Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation
Capitalism in this country has relied on a steady stream of cheap labor. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution codified a new slavery.
Read our other Black History Month posts here.
Charlotte Mountain is the anti-racism committee lead for Mormon Women for Ethical Government.
