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Chapter three provides a detailed study of black and white clubwomen’s efforts to eliminate convict leasing. Central to the comparative analysis of the National Association of Colored Women and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union is their divergent approaches to the rape of black women by prison guards. This chapter engages the complexities of reform and respectability in southern women’s organizational politics in the early twentieth century.

This chapter demonstrates how the ideology and mechanisms of convict labor and New South industrialism were built across state lines, with newspapers as a critical tool. Arthur S. Colyar was to Tennessee who Henry Grady was to Georgia: a leading proponent of New South ideology, political power broker, and newspaper editor. But unlike Grady, Colyar was himself an industrialist, with vast holdings in coal mines—he was a founder of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company—and a proponent and holder of the state convict lease. He used newspaper campaigns to protect the convict lease and his business interests and to fight against free labor. In Tennessee, free labor repeatedly fought against the convict lease system, producing dramatic episodes of labor insurrection.

This chapter underscores the centrality of prison labor in fulfilling the postbellum vision of modernization and industrial prosperity. According to Henry Woodfin Grady, a prominent Georgian and proverbial “spokesman” of the New South, industrialization was to benefit whites exclusively, and industrial progress would hinge on the perpetuation of white supremacy. Consequently, the apparatus of convict leasing was put in place to secure racial hegemony and to dispossess freedwomen and freedmen of their newly acquired liberties. However, during the 1890s, Georgia industrialists had struggled to maintain the vision of New South prosperity while negotiating the female felons' place within the state's convict lease system. Thus, Southern entrepreneurs had been forced to regulate their industrial aspirations to accommodate a growing public and political desire to see black women prisoners moved beyond the bounds of masculine confinement, and utilized in more traditional customs of labor.

This chapter uses a range of archival sources including clemency files, legislative investigations, medical records, and reports of corporal punishment to provide a detailed examination of the infrastructure of convict labor from the late 19^th century through the 1930s. Spanning convict leasing, chain gangs, and the state farm, chapter two focuses on black women’s experiences of labor exploitation, gendered racial terror and brutal conditions of convict labor. This chapter incorporates speculative historical narrative to raise questions about the historical archive and black women’s interior lives.

This chapter examines how the managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution and national spokesman of the New South, Henry W. Grady, led Georgia Democrats in building white supremacy in the South. It examines his support and protection of convict leasing; normalization of inflammatory reporting practices in lynching coverage; promotion of the idea of “equal but separate” that became Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine; use of the Atlanta Constitution as the propaganda machine of New South Democrats; and his national advocacy for the disfranchisement of Black southerners. It also documents the New South and Grady critique of Black press leaders such as T. Thomas Fortune and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

This chapter examines how captains of industry built the modern state of Florida and controlled newspapers to protect their business interests and shape public opinion. Standard Oil tycoon Henry M. Flagler and railroad magnate Henry B. Plant held controlling interests in the most powerful white newspapers in the state, including the Jacksonville Times-Union, to control information flow and public opinion about their use of convict leasing and immigrant peonage to build their respective railroad and hotel empires. Using his control of the press and related business and political interests, Flagler was able to successfully quash a robust Justice Department investigation of his slave labor camps in the Florida Keys.

This chapter focuses on the establishment of the state prison farm in Bradford (later Union) County and the gradual redistribution of inmates from the privately owned lessee camps to the farm as the convict lease was dismantled in stages. It explores also the symbiotic economic relationship between the lease and the prison farm, which was built with convict labor and, from 1916 to 1919, paid for with profits derived solely from the lease of black male prisoners. The early conditions of life and labor for farm-based prisoners are also explored in this chapter.

Notebook 2 reframes Ida B Wells as a thinker of the multitude. In her unfinished autobiography Crusade for Justice, Wells sets aside her image as the maverick opposing lynching singlehandedly. Her autobiography grounds her intellectual and activist legacy in galvanizing collective opposition to racism, sexual violence, and class exploitation, with lynching serving as the microcosm of these horrors across the South and a newly imperial United States. This chapter reinterprets Wells’s canonical pamphlets from the 1890s and 1900s through her autobiography’s viewpoint. This notebook also challenges today’s common-sense view that racism is the by-product of “one bad apple” who can be converted to a less racist view by their victims. Lynching involves a collective reinforcing its superiority through informal and formal institutional channels. Only another collective force can counter it. Wells does not find that agency in “the people”—those who are already recognized as having rights—but in the multitude, that complicated mass at once empowering and destabilizing the State. Finally, this chapter challenges leftist romanticizations of the multitude by showing how it can express itself in mass acts of disinformation and terror and the collective pursuit of truth and justice, when guilt and fear are overcome.

This chapter charts the transition of women prisoners from sexually integrated railroad camps, brickyards, and mines into feminine carceral spaces, narrating the life-world of female captives detained within these gender exclusive settlements. By 1899, Georgia's convict lease system was at the height of local and national deliberation over the welfare of its inmates, its threat to free labor, and the enduring exploitation of female captives, even in female-centered labor camps. For more than a decade, the women prisoners' condition in the state's private lease camps had been a disputed public policy issue, which ultimately culminated in the Georgia General Assembly's decision to relocate all female felons to a newly erected state prison farm in Milledgeville. The establishment of the state farm signified the first major modernizing step toward reforming Georgia's penal enterprises.

This chapter argues that punishment is neither the effect of crime nor solely the effect of economic needs. Rather, punishment is an independent causal force that has shaped the economic organization of neoliberalism. To support this claim, it builds on the work of critical theorists Rusche and Kirchheimer, authors of Punishment and Social Structure (1935). By placing their argument within the framework of Marx's discussion of the inherent relationship between primitive accumulation and incarceration, it preserves their account of the centrality of the relationship between the dispossession of capital and punishment, while critiquing the primary role they assign the modes of production in determining the modes of punishment. After setting up the framework of dispossession and punishment, the chapter then turns to slavery's effect on the modes of punishment in the postbellum South. It argues that, with the rise of convict-leasing as a dominant mode of punishment, we see punishment as restructuring the modes of production and not as the effect of the modes of production. Taking account of this shift demands that we examine the prison not from the metaphysical framework of commodity fetishism but from the framework of prison fetishism. This means moving our analysis of the growth in incarceration from the extraction of surplus value from prisoners' labor to an understanding of how prisons produce convicts as a stigmatized and dispossessed class.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of waiting and, in particular, the extreme experience of prison time doing hard labor in the Jim Crow South. The forms of waiting that are created musically echo the tension experienced both by loved ones waiting for someone’s return and by the prisoner enduring the unbearable cruelty of time at Parchman Farm or as a leased convict. The discussion culminates in an analysis of the “extreme present” of enduring physical and emotional pain echoed in blues that depict the experience of addiction and withdrawal, tying together the temporality of waiting with attempts to limit suffering by dwelling in the present. Key to the argument are analyses of Muddy Waters’s “Long Distance Call,” Bessie Smith’s “In the House Blues,” and Tommy Johnson’s “Canned Heat Blues.”

This chapter shows how the “Big Mules” – the new industrialists who were reshaping northern Alabama – used the press to help turn back a populist insurgency that threatened to empower Black voters and bring convict leasing to an end in that state. Desperate to save his failing newspaper, Montgomery Daily Advertiser publisher and editor William Wallace Screws sought help from the L&N railroad and its brash leader, Milton H. Smith. In return for his paper’s financial subsidy, the Advertiser spread disinformation, dismissed voter fraud, and published opposition research provided by the railroad against populist candidate Reuben F. Kolb during three contentious gubernatorial elections between 1890 and 1894. Kolb’s allies in the “reform press” fought back valiantly.

This chapter traces the desk in the author's office at California State University back to its production in California's Prison Industry Authority—a carceral manufacturing system that, at a rate of thirty to ninety-five cents per hour, employs a segment of the state's imprisoned population to provide goods and services to state agencies that the latter are legislatively mandated to purchase. It analyzes this hidden background of carceral production in terms of the prison industrial complex, the convict lease system, and other Reconstruction-era legal rituals that refashioned American prisons into receptacles that grant sanctuary to racialized forms of punishment prevalent during slavery. It advances a concept of semiotic transfer to explain how the institution of the prison became a functional substitute for the plantation, and how the discourse of “criminality” became racialized. It argues that the antebellum positionality of the “slave” and the postbellum positionality of the “criminal” came to be semiotically and associatively paired and are thus genealogically linked through postbellum legal rituals and everyday practices. The chapter concludes by outlining a two-sided account of abolition involving intertwining movements aimed at mass decarceration and socioeconomic and political reconstruction.

The introduction explores Journalism & Jim Crow’s central argument: For decades after Reconstruction in the South, white newspaper publishers and editors worked closely with political and business allies in the Democratic Party to build a white supremacist society and, in the process, destroy interracial democracy for generations to come. The Black press, South and North, fought against these efforts. This chapter introduces important social, political, and economic topics and concepts in the story this book tells: convict leasing, peonage, lynching, disfranchisement, the Reconstruction era amendments, federal and state law, industrialism, Populism, railroad building, the Solid South, the New South, and the journalism landscape and political world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States.

The introduction outlines the central themes of this collection: the problem of southern distinctiveness; the modernization of the criminal justice system and the centralization of state power; and the relationship between crime control and white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. In doing so, it offers an overview of criminal justice history in the South from the antebellum era through the rise and decline of convict leasing in the postbellum era to the development of new practices surrounding policing, incarceration, and capital punishment after 1890. It also explains the significance of this collection to the historiography on criminal justice in the South, as well as to understanding problems in our present-day penal system. Finally, the introduction summarizes each chapter in the collection.

Conditions of formerly enslaved Georgians worsen after Emancipation, and many turn to the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia. White Georgians, hoping to harness black labor, institute oppressive economic measures and restrictive labor laws and practices. Within this environment, Isaac Anderson establishes a school, plans a return to politics, and begins to organize what will become the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.

This chapter presents Fortune's testimony before Senator Henry W. Blair's Committee on Education and Labor on September 17, 1883, about the facts and his opinions on the “status of the race.” In his testimony one can find many of the themes that he would develop further in Black and White, especially on education and the status of the African American laborer. Fortune, like a number of the other African American witnesses, took the opportunity to protest against discrimination in public facilities and other wrongs suffered by the black population in the South. Fortune, in particular, seized the opportunity to expose the wrongs of the growing convict lease program.

This chapter presents the essay, Whose Problem Is This? for the AME Church Review, where Fortune outlined the racial situation of the day. He did not see the problem as being substantially different from those that faced the country before the Civil War. These issues, argued Fortune, were “as much a menace to national liberty and the preservation of the union of the states as was the problem of slavery.” He discussed five problems—disfranchisement, mob and lynch law, miscegenation laws, separate coach legislation, and the convict lease program. These issues, according to Fortune, were affecting the “honor and credit” of the nation, and the country should address them. In the end, however, although Fortune saw the problem as an issue the government and the country as a whole needed to address, he also deemed it necessary for the race to organize and support its organizations that were employed in the act of educating the nation. Such a comment is a reference to Fortune's Afro-American League, which had collapsed the previous year on the national level.