As Juneteenth Marks Slavery's End, Lawmakers Turn To Forced Prison Labor, Punishment Clause 13 Amend
Last edited Mon Jun 21, 2021, 10:48 AM - Edit history (4)
By Hannah Knowles, Washington Post, June 19, 2021. - Ed.
Days after the official nationwide abolition of slavery in December 1865, Alabama made it illegal for Black farm employees to sell a long list of foods, including corn, rice, cotton and “animal of any kind.” Another law punished Black people for gathering in a “disorderly way,” one professor said in a Cornell Law Review article. Another for carrying a pistol. And whipping and branding were scrapped as penalties, while a new sentence was added: “hard labor for the county.” Desperate to keep profiting from Black bondage, Alabama’s leaders were exploiting an exception to the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery in the U.S. “except as a punishment for crime.” That caveat stands today, allowing forced labor in prisons that disproportionately hold people of color- even as Americans celebrate emancipation with Juneteenth, newly elevated to a federal holiday.
The same day that President Biden signed into law a bill commemorating the date June 19, Democratic lawmakers reintroduced a proposal they say is long overdue to truly end centuries of bondage: a constitutional amendment to remove the “punishment clause.” With key Biden administration priorities such as voting access & changes to policing stalled in Congress, the renewed push to end forced prison work is one of many changes advocates are framing as necessary to back the symbolic embrace of Juneteenth with national action to address racism & inequality. -“We know that the work of making that vision of a just & equal society a reality is unfinished,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said Saturday after introducing the proposed “abolition amendment” with Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.). “.. slavery’s legacy of injustice continues in many ways today.” She is “confident” the amendment will pass & noted some states, red & blue, had recently removed similar exceptions from their constitutions. "We’re in a period of reckoning with our country’s history.”-
Scholars have debated the intentions behind the 13th Amendment’s allowance of forced servitude for people convicted of crimes. But Michele Goodwin, a Univ. of Ca. at Irvine law professor, says Southern lawmakers negotiating the measure were “addicted” to slavery & the White wealth it generated. The abolitionist lawmaker Charles Sumner from Mass. wanted an explicit statement that all men are equal, Goodwin wrote in the Cornell Law Review, & urged his Senate colleagues to “clean the statute book of all existing supports of slavery, so that it may find nothing there to which it may cling for life.”
But other lawmakers beat those ideas back, & a simple statement of equality did not arrive until 1868, when states ratified the 14th Amendment. In the meantime, Goodwin said, Southern states wasted no time in creating hundreds of laws targeting Black people for enslavement through the criminal justice system- barring them from gathering on street corners, or staying in town too long, staying out too late.
New laws paved the way for White people to take Black children into years of servitude by claiming they could care for them better than their own parents, Goodwin told WaPo. “What one finds are these painful letters written by Black parents- who had not been afforded the opportunity to be educated, so they’re writing the best English that they possibly can, the best penmanship- begging & pleading for there to be federal intervention so that they can get their children back,” Goodwin said. Plantations in some places actually expanded after the 13th Amend.'s ratification, scholars have found, while Black people convicted of minor offenses were sent to toil on railroads in chain gangs & work deadly jobs in coal mines. As a Va. Supreme Court justice put it in 1871: A prisoner is a “slave of the State,” his estate to be handled “like that of a dead man.”
“Black Codes” & the Jim Crow laws that followed in the late 19th & 20th c. may be gone, advocates say, but the 13th Amend. punishment clause remains consequential for Black Americans far more likely to be incarcerated. That legacy was highlighted in "13th," Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary...
Read More,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/06/19/13th-amendment-prisons-juneteenth/
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- "13th" Documentary, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5895028/
*STORYLINE: The film begins with the idea that 25% of the people in the world who are incarcerated are incarcerated in the U.S. Although the U.S. has just 5% of the world's population.
> "13th" charts the explosive growth in America's prison population; in 1970, there were about 200,000 prisoners; today, the prison population is more than 2 million. The documentary touches on chattel slavery; D. W. Griffith's film "The Birth of a Nation"; Emmett Till; the civil rights movement; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Richard M. Nixon; and Ronald Reagan's declaration of the war on drugs and much more.—(Ulf Kjell Gür)
- Ava DuVernay, film director of "13th", http://www.avaduvernay.com/
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- "13th" *WATCH* FULL FEATURE ON NETFLIX, By Dir. Ava DuVernay, (2016).
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- "Slavery By Another Name," PBS TV documentary (2012) based on the book by 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas A. Blackmon, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1855347/
- "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II," by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday), Pulitzer Prize Winner 2009, General Nonfiction. A precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and that rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity.
- Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University (left), presents the 2009 General Nonfiction prize to Douglas A. Blackmon. Douglas A. Blackmon is the Atlanta Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal. He has written extensively on race, the economy, and American society. Reared in the Mississippi Delta, he lives in downtown Atlanta with his wife and children. - Read More, https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/douglas-blackmon
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- PBS: PROLOGUE, "Slavery By Another Name" TV documentary, 2012.
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- *WATCH* FULL DOCUMENTARY, "Slavery By Another Name" + 'Making of the Film' extra feature, online, PBS. https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/watch/
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- "The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," (2010) by Michelle Alexander.
The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Since its publication in 2010, the book has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year; been dubbed the “secular bible of a new social movement” by numerous commentators, including Cornel West; and has led to consciousness-raising efforts in universities, churches, community centers, re-entry centers, and prisons nationwide. The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face... Read More, https://newjimcrow.com/about
- Author Michelle Alexander, civil rights lawyer turned legal scholar.
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