Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon

Alabama, companies were fined
    $150 a head if they al owed a prisoner to escape. For a time, state
    law mandated that if a convict got free while being transported to
    the mines, the sheri or deputy responsible had to serve out the
    prisoner's sentence. Companies often faced their strongest criticism
    for al owing black and white prisoners to share the same cel s.
    "White convicts and colored convicts shal not be chained together,"
    read Alabama law.51
    In almost every respect—the acquisition of workers, the lease
    arrangements, the responsibilities of the leaseholder to detain and
    care for them, the incentives for good behavior—convict leasing
    adopted practices almost identical to those emerging in slavery in
    the 1850s.
    By the late 1870s, the de ning characteristics of the new
    involuntary servitude were clearly apparent. It would be obsessed
    with ensuring disparate treatment of blacks, who at al times in the
    ensuing fty years would constitute the vast majority of those sold
    into labor. They were routinely starved and brutalized by
    into labor. They were routinely starved and brutalized by
    corporations, farmers, government o cials, and smal -town
    businessmen intent on achieving the most lucrative balance
    between the productivity of captive labor and the cost of sustaining
    them. The consequences for African Americans were grim. In the
    rst two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent
    of them died.52 In the fol owing year, mortality rose to 35 percent.
    In the fourth, nearly 45 percent were kil ed.53
    I I
    SLAVERY’S INCREASE
    "Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak."
    Henry and Mary did not wait long to begin their increase.
    Cooney, a lit le girl, came to them before the end of another
    harvest season had passed.1 The arrival of an infant, even more
    so a rst child, to a pair of former slaves in the rst years after
    emancipation must have been an event of sublime joy. A young
    black family of the early 1870s already knew that the presumptions
    of ful freedom that had accompanied the end of slavery were being
    gravely chal enged in the South. But surrounding and overwhelming
    the anxieties triggered by those obstructions—violence by the Ku
    Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups and the machinations of
    white political leaders—was the astonishing range of possibilities
    now at least theoretical y available to a newly born child.
    While Cooney was stil a babe, the northern states by
    overwhelming majorities rati ed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
    amendments to the Constitution, abolishing with absolute clarity
    the institution of slavery as it had existed for the previous 250 years
    and granting ful citizenship and voting rights to al black
    Americans. A black toddler in central Alabama would learn his rst
    words at a time when black men were gathering regularly with
    others to elect those who would govern their counties and states.
    Cooney was seven years old when the U.S. Congress passed its
    rst Civil Rights Act, further guaranteeing the right of African
    Americans to vote on the same terms as whites and to live as ful
    citizens in the eyes of the law. The new state legislatures of the
    South, now including substantial numbers of black Republicans,
    passed laws mandating for the rst time in the southern states that
    children, whether black or white, be a orded some semblance of
    basic education. By 1871, more than 55,000 black children were
    at ending public school in Alabama.
    at ending public school in Alabama.
    Henry and Mary knew there would be trouble, yes, plenty of it.
    But the young man and woman, il iterate, provincial, and unskil ed,
    had every reason to expect nonetheless that in the expiring of ten or
    twenty years, their daughter and the boisterous brood of boys and
    girls who would fol ow her would live lives in a world so
    transformed from their own as to be ut erly unrecognizable.
    By the time Cooney turned two, as Thanksgiving approached