Today is Juneteenth. The day that news of emancipation and the war's end reached Galveston, Texas. I would like to remind you all, however, that the fight did not just end when we passed "go," and that there were many ways that the white powers that be did whatever they could to maintain some form of enslavement.
One of those methods is the convict labor leasing system. As early as 1868, Georgia began leasing its convicts, disproportionately black, to companies to perform manual labor. Much like when slaveowners "leased" their slaves, those doing the labor did not see the extent of these profits. The work done by chain gangs in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century built what we call the New South. The South was industrializing as fast as it could to catch up with the North--inmates became industrial cogs. Imagine: an all-white PD, an all-white jury, no rules mandating a right to counsel. You can imagine how prisons became an immediate form of social control in a state that was scrambling to regain white supremacy.
Here's the thing--when we think of chain gangs, do we ever, ever, think of women? Because Black women were also bound to this new carceral state, and faced even more harrowing challenges as they fought to protect themselves from sexual violence and harassment. Women like Mattie Crawford, who killed her abusive father, was sent to prison for life and became a blacksmith at the prison in Milledgeville for her lifetime sentence. Pregnant women were a nuisance--prison wardens encouraged if not carried out infanticide. LeFlouria navigates race and gender to reveal when the two come in to play for these Black convict women, and not often in their favor.
It's a hard read. It's a necessary read. Our antebellum roads, buildings, bridges, canals, were built on slave labor. Our Jim Crow-era growth and infrastructure were built, in large part, by prison labor.
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