Over the past couple of weeks I have seen a lot of conversation around the need to educate ourselves about the parts of history we were not taught in school.
I was lucky enough to study a degree which asked us to think critically about what we were reading and to question the status quo of the canon. For me, my university was quite an eye-opener.
English Literature seminars were where I first encountered honest discussion of the colonial project without a single interjection of ‘yeah, but think of the good that came from it too, what about civilisation?’.
It was where I learned to question depictions of characters of colour written by white authors: the ‘madwoman in the attic’, the idea of the ‘happy slave’, the overly-sexualised, exotic ‘other’ that we encounter again and again in canonical classics.
It was were I first read Leila Aboulela’s short story ‘The Museum’ and was presented with a vision of Africa and immigration which I did not recognise – one where Sudan was a place of warmth, wealth, and culture, and the immigrants spoke better English than the Brits.
I’m not saying it was a perfect education, or intersectional enough by any standards. Reading lists need to be expanded to include authors of colour outside of discussions on race, rather than simply trotting them out where they are deemed ‘relevant’.
And while studying Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart alongside Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was certainly an impactful experience – one that gave context to the societal attitudes in which Achebe was writing, and nuance to his decision to use ‘the master’s tongue’ – we then went on to read much more of Conrad’s work and Achebe was never again mentioned.
These seminars were massively educational for me, but that can’t be where the learning stops. In fact, these brief glimpses of a different perspective only served to highlight how lacking my education on race in the UK has been, and how insidiously embedded the narrative of white superiority is in all aspects of our culture.
I intended to write a blog giving an overview of several significant historical events that I have learned about only since leaving school, but as I started writing, I realised I cannot do full justice to the weight of this history in one blog. So, I decided to publish these as a short series of articles on black history that we should all be aware of.
First up is the Black Codes and convict leasing; or, slavery by another name.
The Black Codes and Convict Leasing
Until very recently, I was under the understanding that slavery was abolished in the States in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. But this is not quite correct, it was simply given a makeover.
As slavery came to an end, the southern states started passing a series of laws called ‘black codes’ with the intention of maintaining white supremacy. These codes deprived people of the right to vote or serve on juries and forced workers to sign contracts that limited them to one job, preventing them from earning more money. They even forced orphaned African-American children to work for the very same white farmers who would have once owned them.
The result of these laws was that a disproportionate population of African-Americans were forced into the criminal system where a loophole in the 13th Amendment allowing ‘involuntary servitude’ as a ‘punishment for crime’ helped wealthy landowners continue a system of exploitation long after slavery had ended.
Thus started the practice of convict leasing. Prisons would hire out their convicts to private companies where they were forced to carry out heavy labour in appalling conditions. Many worked in coal mines, cotton plantations, and on the railroads. The death rate for these prisoners was up to 10 times higher than prisoners from non-lease states and unknown thousands died from ‘injury, disease, and torture’.
Economically, however, this was a win-win situation. The state sector was able to generate income and save money on feeding and housing prisoners, while the private sector had wide access to cheap labour without having to worry about spending money on upholding workers’ rights.
Officially, Alabama was the final state to end convict leasing in 1928 but elements of this practice still linger on in the prison system today.
The Prison Industrial Complex, a term coined by Angela Davis in the 1990s, refers to ‘the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems’.
To this day, many inmates take part in ‘work programmes’, manufacturing products such as furniture, food, clothes, agricultural products, and more for less than minimum wage.
The introduction of the Black Codes and the practice of convict leasing lays waste to the idea that Black people in America were freed the day that slavery was abolished. White supremacy was maintained and upheld by the very legislation that sought to do away with it, and the effects of this discrimination are still very much felt today.
Further Reading:
I am no historian and intend this series to be simply an introduction to these events, please dig further and uncover the histories our teachers never taught.
Learning should not cease once we leave the institutions of education that we grew up in, nor should we blindly accept all that we were taught while we were there. We live in a world of unlimited access to information – let’s use it!
Slavery By Another Name, PBS Documentary
Exploiting Black Labor After the Abolition of Slavery, The Conversation
What You Should Know About the Prison Industrial Complex, ThoughtCo.
Articles on Inmate Labour, The Marshall Project