Slavery by Another Name Paper Personal Background Paper Interview & Literature Review Paper Social, Economic & Environmental Justice Reflection Paper Criteria
8-10 points 17-20 points 17-20 points 8-10 points Consistently does all or almost all of the following:
● Accurately interprets evidence, statements, graphics, questions, etc.
● Identifies the salient arguments (reasons and claims) pro and con.
● Thoughtfully analyzes and evaluates major alternative points of view.
● Draws warranted, judicious, non-fallacious conclusions.
● Justifies key results and procedures, explains assumptions and reasons.
● Fair-mindedly follows where evidence and reasons lead.
6-7 points 11-16 points 11-16 points 6-7 points Does most or many of the following:
● Accurately interprets evidence, statements, graphics, questions, etc.
● Identifies relevant arguments (reasons and claims) pro and con.
● Offers analyses and evaluations of obvious alternative points of view.
● Draws warranted, non-fallacious conclusions.
● Justifies some results or procedures, explains reasons.
● Fair-mindedly follows where evidence and reasons lead.
3-5 points 6-10 points 6-10 points 3-5 points Does most or many of the following:
● Misinterprets evidence, statements, graphics, questions, etc.
● Fails to identify strong, relevant counter-arguments.
● Ignores or superficially evaluates obvious alternative points of view.
● Draws unwarranted or fallacious conclusions.
● Justifies few results or procedures, seldom explains reasons.
● Regardless of the evidence or reasons, maintains or defends views based on self-interest or preconceptions.
0-2 points 0-5 points 0-5 points 0-2 points Consistently does all or almost all of the following:
● Offers biased interpretations of evidence, statements, graphics, questions, information, or the points of view of others.
● Fails to identify or hastily dismisses strong, relevant counter-arguments.
● Ignores or superficially evaluates obvious alternative points of view.
● Argues using fallacious or irrelevant reasons, and unwarranted claims.
● Does not justify results or procedures, nor explain reasons.
● Regardless of the evidence or reasons, maintains or defends views based on self-interest or preconceptions.
● Exhibits close-mindedness or hostility to reason.
Instructions
Go to Slavery by Another Name video.
To watch the PBS documentary, “Slavery by Another Name” based on, Blackmon, D. A. (2008). Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books.
* Write 3 pages responding to four of the discussion questions below.
* Title page, abstract, and references are not included in the required page count.
* Use APA format and clearly identify questions being addressed. Be prepared to discuss all of the questions in class.
Critical Thinking Discussion Questions for “Slavery by another Name”:
1. Why is it important to document hidden histories?
2. Why are certain histories hidden or difficult to uncover?
3. What new insights did you gain after watching this documentary?
4. To what extent do you think a person’s racist attitudes and behaviors can be forgiven due to the “norm” of their surrounding culture?
5. In what ways, if any, are we responsible for our ancestor’s actions? Is it fair to hold individuals accountable for things their ancestors did?
6. How have the dynamics of relationships between black people and white people changed since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s?
7. Blackmon asserts that real slavery didn’t end until the 1940’s. In what ways is this statement true? What forms of modern slavery exist today?
8. How does the history represented in the documentary help us understand present conditions for people of color today? How can knowing history empower people today?
9. What current events do you believe should be documented, so that they are not hidden from future generations? Why?
10. After viewing the documentary, do you believe that racism is inherent or taught? Explain.
Slavery by another name:
TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO FILE:
00:00:00
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00:00:00
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:
00:00:00
PBS
00:00:00
ANNOUNCER Viewers like you makes this program possible. Support your local PBS station.
00:00:05
The words spoken by the actors are based on original documents, including sworn testimony.
00:00:10
Georgia, 1903
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CARRIE KINSEY Mr. President, I have a brother about 14 years old. A man hired him from me and I heard of him no more. He went and sold him to McGrehan they’ve been workin’ him in prison for 12 months. I asked him to let me have him, but he won’t let him go.
00:00:30
LAURENCE FISHBURNE For a period of nearly 80 years, between the Civil War and World War II, black Southerners were no longer slaves, but they were not yet free.
00:00:45
[music]
00:00:55
LAURENCE FISHBURNE In one of the most shameful and little-known chapters of American history, generations of black Southerners were forced to labor against their will.
00:01:05
RISA GOLUBOFF From almost the first moment, white Southerners were responding to try to put African Americans back into a position as close to slavery as they possibly could.
00:01:20
KHALIL MUHAMMAD The Old South, and what was quickly becoming the New South, could not proceed without the work of African Americans.
00:01:30
MARY ELLEN CURTIN But if you had something for free in the past, you don’t necessarily want to pay for it now.
00:01:40
ADAM GREEN It was a straight, simple, exploitative system. There was only power, there was only force, and there was only brutality.
00:01:55
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON What happened in that period of time, was so much more terrible than anything most Americans recognize or understand today. The depth of poverty, the inability of African Americans to access any of the mechanisms of wealth achievement and growth. They’re all rooted in this terroristic kind of regime that existed in so many places.
00:02:20
BERNARD KINSEY Their ability to have what we call the American Dream, that is what has been stolen from black folks all through the South. And that legacy has to be understood so that people will be able to speak to it and give our ancestors voice.
00:02:40
SLAVERY by Another Name
00:02:50
Narrated By
00:02:50
Laurence Fishburne
00:02:55
[sil.]
00:03:00
SHARON MALONE My name is Sharon Malone and my family is originally from Wilcox County, Alabama. My father was born in 1893. As a child, I never knew why Dad didn’t share many of the stories growing up in the rural South. There was so little that I actually knew about the generations beyond my parents, and I realized, I said, “Why don’t I know these stories, and why don’t I know “who those people are?” African Americans are innately wired to want to know who we are. It’s almost like being an adopted child. We have no understanding of not only what we have endured, but what we have survived.
00:03:50
[music]
00:03:55
1865
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LAURENCE FISHBURNE Freedom must have felt glorious to those who’d never known it. With the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, four million former slaves could embark on new lives with no one in charge but themselves.
00:04:25
[music]
00:04:30
Mary Ellen Curtin
00:04:30
Historian
00:04:30
MARY ELLEN CURTIN And what they desired more than anything was independence. They wanted independence from white owners, they wanted their own churches, they wanted their own schools, they wanted freedom to move.
00:04:45
Adam Green
00:04:45
Historian
00:04:45
ADAM GREEN African Americans after emancipation, are looking at the potential, not only to enjoy and receive freedom, but to live it. They’re deeply committed to reaffirming marriage vows, they’re deeply committed to reconstituting families.
00:05:10
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Ezekiel Archey, born into slavery, was six when freedom came. His mother moved the family, Zeke, his two brothers and a sister from Georgia to Alabama, away from the old plantation and toward a new future.
00:05:30
[music]
00:05:35
James Grossman
00:05:35
Historian
00:05:35
JAMES GROSSMAN African Americans were willing to work very hard and exploit themselves in the same way that immigrants who have come to this country have exploited themselves and their families with long workdays. They were willing to do that, but they wanted to own their own land, they wanted to control those hours, they wanted to be the ones to decide.
00:05:55
LAURENCE FISHBURNE John Davis was born a dozen years after the war. He grew up in freedom, working hard on an Alabama farm rented by his parents.
00:06:05
Douglas A. Blackmon
00:06:05
Author “Slavery by Another Name”
00:06:05
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON There was a tremendous motivation and desire to integrate into American life.
00:06:15
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Green Cottenham, born in 1885, was also the son of an Alabama farmer. He came of age in a nation that was increasingly urban, industrial and modern.
00:06:30
Tonya Groomes
00:06:30
Descendant
00:06:30
TONYA GROOMES This is a photo of George Cottenham, he’s my great grandfather. He was actually Green Cottenham’s first cousin. How hopeful my Cottenham ancestors must have been about bright futures for their family. These were hardworking, honest people.
00:06:50
LAURENCE FISHBURNE But freedom had come at a tremendous cost. The war devastated the Southern economy, which had supported one of the wealthiest aristocracies in the world.
00:07:00
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON The cotton economy was in complete shambles. The fields had been burned and the cotton gins had been destroyed. Equipment that was necessary for the production of cotton didn’t exist anymore. But also, the primary engine of the cotton economy, that being the labor of slaves, was lost.
00:07:20
JAMES GROSSMAN In the five major cotton states of the deep South, nearly half of all capital, nearly half of all investment was in human beings. So when those human beings were confiscated, when the investment was transferred in essence from slaveholders to the people themselves that meant a huge loss of capital to Southern slaveholders, to the people who controlled the economy of the South.
00:07:50
LAURENCE FISHBURNE A tiny, slaveholding elite had owned the majority of the region’s four million slaves. Among them was Lucinda Comer, a widow. After the war, she and her sons oversaw the family’s enterprises in cotton, lumber, and corn.
00:08:10
Cristina Comer
00:08:10
Descendant
00:08:10
CRISTINA COMER I’m the great-great-granddaughter of B.B. Comer, who was the governor of Alabama, and the great-great niece of J. W. Comer. The things that I heard about the Comer men, especially B.B. Comer, were about their entrepreneurial spirit and being self-made men, there was never a fool or a coward it was said in the Comer family.
00:08:40
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Emancipation turned the former slaveholding world upside down.
00:08:45
Khalil Muhammad
00:08:45
Historian
00:08:45
KHALIL MUHAMMAD The simple reality of people that they had once owned, now were entitled to the same fruits of their labor, the same ability to look a white person in the eye, a man or a woman, and to demand equal respect, to be called by one’s first and last names, challenged everything to the bitter core of white people’s souls.
00:09:10
JAMES GROSSMAN You have a group of people who are accustomed to have people serve them. Now, suddenly, these people are free, they own guns… you’d be as worried as hell, because what you’re worried is that people are going to take revenge. You also are worried that people aren’t going to do any work anymore.
00:09:35
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Most of the South’s eight million whites had not owned slaves. Poverty was widespread, and about a third of whites were illiterate.
00:09:45
ADAM GREEN Those individuals see blacks moving around, trying to get land, trying to improve themselves, as competitors. They see a zero sum gain, in which they’re going to lose the more that blacks gain.
00:10:00
LAURENCE FISHBURNE These whites aligned with leaders of the former Confederacy, aided by President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor. They formed vigilante groups to attack and intimidate blacks. The violence grew widespread. In the spring of 1866, Congress intervened. Over the objections of the president, it launched an era known as Radical Reconstruction.
00:10:35
Risa Goluboff
00:10:35
Historian
00:10:35
RISA GOLUBOFF At the beginning of Reconstruction, there was a tremendous federal will to both bring the South into submission, but also to protect the African American Civil Rights.
00:10:45
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Passed in 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment recognized the citizenship of all freed people. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was passed, which upheld the right of black men to vote.
00:11:00
ADAM GREEN Reconstruction was an attempt to create a country in which it would be possible to have a biracial and equal citizenship.
00:11:10
KHALIL MUHAMMAD Reconstruction gave African Americans, for the first time, across the South, the opportunity to serve on juries, to be witnesses in trial, to serve as judges. It also made possible an entire generation of black politicians across the South, almost as many as 1500 serving through the end of the 19th century.
00:11:30
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Reconstruction governments in many parts of the South succeeded in passing new social legislation creating the South’s first free public schools.
00:11:45
UNKNOWN Hey-ya!
00:11:50
LAURENCE FISHBURNE But white resistance to biracial government in the South intensified, and national political support began to wane. By 1874, voters had shifted the balance of power in Congress, allowing for the South’s return to local control.
00:12:10
MARY ELLEN CURTIN There is no sustained federal presence in the South really after 1874. What they come away with is that a sense that this is a really violent situation and that there’s not much we can do about it. And there’s not much perhaps we even should do about it.
00:12:25
ADAM GREEN African Americans seeking freedom, could count on less and less help from the federal government, less and less help from sympathetic Northerners, and they could count on more and more and more animosity and attack from Southern whites.
00:12:40
[music]
00:12:45
UNKNOWN Hee-ya!
00:12:50
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON I grew up in a black part of Mississippi, and I went to schools that were 60%, 75% black all through my childhood. That was in the 1970’s. What I learned about the Emancipation Proclamation was the most simplistic version of it, that it brought an end to slavery. I also was taught, as most Americans were in some way, that the end of slavery unleashed this population of people who were ill equipped for freedom, and that was all offered up in some respect as an explanation for the repressive things that would have been done to African Americans, even the repressive things that I knew about. What I came to realize, was that that fundamentally didn’t happen.
00:13:35
[sil.]
00:13:40
1874
00:13:40
LAURENCE FISHBURNE With the end of Reconstruction, the nature of both crime and punishment in the South changed dramatically. In state after state, and county after county, new laws targeted African Americans and effectively criminalized black life.
00:14:00
[music]
00:14:05
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON It was a crime in the South for a farm worker to walk beside a railroad. It was a crime in the South to speak loudly in the company of white women. It was a crime to sell the products of your farm after dark.
00:14:20
Talitha LeFlouria
00:14:20
Historian
00:14:20
TALITHA LEFLOURIA Anything from spitting or drinking or being found to be drunk in public or loitering in public spaces could result in confinement. So there was an over exaggeration of African American criminality during this time period. It’s not to absolve all prisoners from having committed crimes, but there were many trumped-up charges.
00:14:45
KHALIL MUHAMMAD One of the most infamous set of laws to come out of this period were the Pig Laws, passed in Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, enhancing penalties for what had been previously misdemeanor offenses, to now felony offenses.
00:15:05
LAURENCE FISHBURNE In Mississippi, theft of a pig worth as little as a dollar could mean five years in prison. In Tennessee, hard labor might result from stealing an eight-cent fence rail.
00:15:20
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON But the most powerful, the most damaging of all of these laws were the vagrancy statutes. In every Southern state, you became a criminal if you could not prove at any given moment that you were employed.
00:15:35
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Under slavery, most black crime was punished by slaveholders, leaving the courts to discipline whites. Now, only about ten percent of those arrested were white.
00:15:50
MARY ELLEN CURTIN Now, what does this mean? Does this mean that white people are not committing crimes in the South? We know that’s not true.
00:15:55
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Southern states had a history of placing prisoners with industries that would bear the cost of guarding and housing them, in exchange for their labor. Now states also began to charge fees, renting prisoners to companies by the month. The highest rates were for the strongest workers and longest sentences.
00:16:20
ADAM GREEN When you go to the 13th Amendment, one of the fascinating things about the text of that amendment is that it says that slavery is abolished, except in the case of a punishment for a crime. And within that wiggle room, what you see in it is that there’s still the possibility of extending slavery, as it were, by another name.
00:16:45
[sil.]
00:17:00
LAURENCE FISHBURNE The system was known as convict leasing.
00:17:05
[music]
00:17:10
MARY ELLEN CURTIN It took time for the system of convict leasing to develop. It took time for the state to realize that prisoners, believe it or not, could be a source of profit. Once that revenue starts coming in, they’re pleasantly surprised. This is new revenue we never had before.
00:17:30
LAURENCE FISHBURNE The State of Alabama earned $14,000 in its first year of convict leasing, 1874. By 1890, revenue was $164,000, roughly $4.1 million today.
00:17:50
[music]
00:17:55
LAURENCE FISHBURNE By then, states throughout the South and hundreds of counties and cities were engaged in some form of leasing convicts to private industry.
00:18:10
KHALIL MUHAMMAD And it gave tremendous discretionary power for the private owner, either a landowner or a corporation or a coal mine, could be any business concern to do what they wanted with that African American.
00:18:25
1884
00:18:25
EZEKIEL ARCHEY We as convicts, is something like a man drowning. We have been convicted of felonies and because of that, we have lost every friend on earth.
00:18:45
LAURENCE FISHBURNE In 1884, a series of remarkable letters was sent from the Pratt Coal Mines to Alabama’s new inspector of prisons. Their author was Ezekiel Archey, now a 25-year-old convict.
00:19:00
EZEKIEL ARCHEY All these years of how we suffered. We have looked death in the face, worked hungry, thirsty, half-clothed and sore.
00:19:20
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Archey was one of hundreds of convicts now being worked in a growing network of mines and factories around Alabama’s new industrial center, Birmingham.
00:19:35
[music]
00:19:40
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Founded in 1871 and fed by intersecting railway lines, Birmingham was poised to exploit Alabama’s rich underground deposits of coal, limestone, and iron ore:the ingredients of steel. This was the new industrial South, envisioned just prior to the Civil War by slaveholder John T. Milner.
00:20:05
[music]
00:20:10
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON John T. Milner was a brilliant engineer, extraordinary businessman; he was also a supreme racist and a despotic person.
00:20:20
UNKNOWN Negro labor can be made exceedingly profitable in manufacturing iron and in rolling mills, provided there is an overseer, a Southern man who knows how to manage Negroes.
00:20:35
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON He laid out some of the first railroad lines that would run across Alabama. In many respects, he was the Father of Southern Industrialization, particularly in the deep, deep South.
00:20:50
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Milner’s vision triggered decades of rapid industrial growth. After emancipation, industrialists replaced slaves with convicts, acquiring thousands from state and county governments.
00:21:05
MARY ELLEN CURTIN You can’t drive free labor the same way that you can force prisoners to mine five tons of coal a day. And this is why people like Milner wanted prisoners in his coal mines. He saw them as a great source of profit, and he didn’t have to worry about labor disputes.
00:21:25
UNKNOWN We would leave the cells around 3:00 a.m., and return at 8:00 p.m., going the distance of 3 miles through rain or snow.
00:21:45
MARY ELLEN CURTIN To describe the conditions in coal mine at this time, and to say that they’re primitive is, you can’t even imagine it.
00:21:55
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON This is a place where for weeks or months at a time, men might never see daylight. The mine was often filled with standing water around their ankles and their feet. They had to drink from that water. Disease ran rampant through these mines.
00:22:10
KHALIL MUHAMMAD They were incredibly dangerous places to work, being subjected to violent explosions, poisonous gases that were released as coal fell from the walls, in addition to the falling coal itself.
00:22:25
MARY ELLEN CURTIN Whippings, keeping people chained up, brutal kinds of physical torture, and mental abuse are the norm. A lot of the things that kept people in control under slavery, are amplified under this convict system.
00:22:40
UNKNOWN Zeke Archey was one of about 500 convicts at the Pratt Mines near Birmingham, nearly half the company’s workforce. They were overseen by J.W. Comer, the former slaveholder whose enterprises now included convict mining.
00:23:00
EZEKIEL ARCHEY That Comer’s a hard man. I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him hit men, 100 and 160 times, with a 10-pronged strap, then say they was not whipped.
00:23:25
CRISTINA COMER When I learned about the brutality of J. W. Comer, I umm… well, I just started weeping, and umm… I actually didn’t leave my house for two days, ’cause I was in such a state of grief and shock. The stories that I heard about all the Comer men when I was growing up, were about self-made men. And so to learn about the ways that they weren’t really self-made, but were making themselves on the backs and by the blood of other people, specifically the blacks and the convict leasing system, definitely shattered that image for me.
00:24:20
EZEKIEL ARCHEY He’d go off after an escaped man, one day, and dig his grave the same day.
00:24:35
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Exposés of the convict labor system described it as “worse than slavery.” Slaves had been a significant long-term investment. A convict could be rented for as little as $9 a month.
00:24:50
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON It was never in the economic interest of a slave owner to kill his own slaves or to abuse them so terribly that they couldn’t work anymore. So their economic value protected them in certain ways. After the Civil War, someone working these kinds of forced laborers, would push them to the very limits of human endurance.
00:25:15
EZEKIEL ARCHEY We are the men who do the work. Look at the white men… how many are cutting 5 or 4 ton coal per day? They are few.
00:25:30
ADAM GREEN Convict leasing was a source of labor where you could realize the maximum return at a minimum social cost. The feeding, of course, was next to nothing, health was next to nothing.
00:25:45
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Convict miners cost as much as 50% to 80% less than free miners, and could be worked 6 days a week. Their presence allowed companies to depress wages and resist unions.
00:26:00
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON When one could obtain black labor at almost no cost, the profits for that form of business were enormous.
00:26:10
[music]
00:26:15
LAURENCE FISHBURNE In Florida, prisoners extracted gum and resin from tall pines and transformed it into turpentine. In Georgia, they hauled wet clay from riverbanks, molding it into the millions of bricks needed for new buildings and homes. From Texas to Louisiana, convicts forced their way through acres of virgin forest, harvesting timber and building railroads In all, more than 15,000 prisoners worked in Southern industries in 1886, and that number was rising quickly. In many labor camps, as many as a third of male convicts were boys younger than 16.
00:27:05
[music]
00:27:10
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Girls and women were also forced into labor.
00:27:15
TALITHA LEFLOURIA Over 90% of convict laborers in Georgia were African American men. The next highest percentage would obviously be white men, but African American women were also utilized in these various tasks. In manual labor, black women are working in brickyards, in turpentine camps, in mining camps, farms, in lumberyards.
00:27:40
KHALIL MUHAMMAD Convict leasing becomes a new form of economic development in the South, and a ubiquitous form of punishment for Southerners as the criminal justice system expanded itself.
00:27:50
ADAM GREEN And sweeps would take place all throughout the South, whether it was for a dice game, whether it was for an altercation, whether it was for being mouthy or uppity.
00:28:05
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON The record of thousands upon thousands of people arrested in this way, is everywhere in the South. In the fall, when it was time to pick cotton, huge numbers of black people are arrested in all of the cotton-growing counties. There are surges in arrests in counties in Alabama in the days before coincidentally a labor agent from the coal mines in Birmingham is coming to town that day to pick up whichever county convicts are there.
00:28:35
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Some charges were serious. But more than two-thirds of all state prisoners at the time of Zeke Archey’s arrest, including Archey, were convicted under vague charges of burglary and larceny. County prisoners too were sent to the mines. For often trivial offenses, they faced the real possibility of death. In some Alabama prison camps, convicts died at a rate of 30% to 40% a year.
00:29:10
ADAM GREEN And this system is one that I think in many ways, needs to be understood as brutal in a social sense, but fiendishly rational in an economic sense. Because where else could one take a black worker and work them literally to death after slavery? And when that worker died, one simply had to go and get another convict.
00:29:35
[music]
00:29:55
LAURENCE FISHBURNE The South’s state prison population continued to grow, reaching 19,000 people by 1890. Nearly 90% of those held were African American. When folded into national statistics, the concentration of black prisoners seemed to reflect an alarming rise in black crime.
00:30:25
KHALIL MUHAMMAD So as early as 1890, African Americans are almost 3 times overrepresented in the prison population. The general population is 12%, the nation’s prisons’ populations of blacks is 30%.
00:30:35
MARY ELLEN CURTIN So there are many important implications and long-term consequences for this convict leasing system. Not only is it so oppressive, but when you have an overwhelmingly black prison population, it cements that relationship between criminality and race in people’s minds to the degree that it’s seen as something inherent.
00:31:00
KHALIL MUHAMMAD Southern editorialists, sociologists, politicians, are all saying that the statistics prove that black people are a criminal race and that freedom had been a mistake.
00:31:10
David Levering Lewis
00:31:10
Historian
00:31:10
DAVID LEVERING LEWIS If you were to ask most Southerners, white Southerners, what they thought of African Americans in the 1850’s, the 1860’s, even into the 1870’s, one profile would have been of people who are loyal, dutiful, trustworthy. Those same people in the 1880’s and by the 1890’s have been demonized. They no longer are trustworthy, they no longer have the capacity for citizenship.
00:31:45
LAURENCE FISHBURNE By the 1890s, white voters had reversed the civil rights gains made during Reconstruction. New state constitutions kept blacks out of voting booths and limited funding for black schools. Racial segregation was mandated by law.
00:32:05
JAMES GROSSMAN They do this because it’s important to remind black people, day after day after day, minute after minute, that they have a place in this society and that that place is subordinate. So what that means is that when a black person is walking down the street and a white person walks towards them, they step into the gutter.
00:32:25
BARBARA JEAN BELISLE My name is Barbara Jean Belisle. I was born in Birmingham in 1936. You had to stay in your place. Now, my daddy was the one who was daring. He used to be called that uppity nigger by white folks because he believed that we were just as good as anybody else. He’s a smart man; he’s one of the first black men in this area to register to vote. There were a lot of times truckloads of KKK folks would pass by the house, where he had made white folks mad about something. He wouldn’t let my mother work. She went to clean up a house one time, and he went over to pick her up and she was cleaning the cabinets down on her knees, trying to clean out a cabinet, he told her, “You’re not going back, you clean up your own cabinets.” And that’s the kind of man he was. But he’s another story though, I’d have to talk about him another time.
00:33:20
[music]
00:33:25
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Segregation was not only mandated by Southern states, it was upheld by the US Supreme Court in an 1896 ruling, Plessy versus Ferguson.
00:33:35
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON And after that, white Southerners, white legislatures, never had any reservation about imposing the most severe, the most repressive restrictions on black life.
00:33:50
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Ezekiel Archey was scheduled for release on February 6, 1887, at the age of 28, but he was not free, a new indictment, for reasons unknown, was pending.
00:34:05
EZEKIEL ARCHEY This letter is not all I could write, but my condition will not permit. Fate seems to curse the convict, death seems to summon us hence.
00:34:25
[music]
00:34:35
LAURENCE FISHBURNE As the 19th century came to a close, and for many decades to come, the possibility of freedom was overshadowed by the constant threat of forced labor and violence.
00:34:50
[music]
00:35:00
LAURENCE FISHBURNE Decades after the Civil War, the nation was reunited. But the place of black Americans within it seemed more uncertain than ever.
00:35:10
[music]
00:35:15
ADAM GREEN Many whites in the South are completely indifferent about whether black people live or die. They want to see them in their place. They want to see them as an exploitable system of labor. They want to see them as an affirmation of their racial superiority. And if they don’t fulfill that role, then to hell with them.
00:35:40
[music]
00:35:50
Bernard Kinsey
00:35:50
Descendant
00:35:50
PBS
00:35
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