On Jan 1, two years before, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order, declaring that all slaves in states in rebellion against the Union, which included Texas, were free. This proclamation was an act of war, intended to deprive the Confederacy of the support of the slaves, which undergirded their war effort and the economy. It claimed to free the slaves in those states that had seceded from the Union and therefore did not recognize the authority of the Union or of Lincoln. The fact is that while the proclamation did not really free any slaves, it did undermine the Confederacy because many slaves, when they learned of it, abandoned their masters and attached themselves to the Union troops in their area for protection.

The Order did not even claim to free the slaves in the border states of Delaware, Maryland, West VIrginia, Kentucky and Missouri which had remained loyal to the Union. Actually, no slaves were freed until the thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, was ratified by the states on Dec.6th of 1865. The amendment had been previously passed in the Senate on April 8 of 1864 and in the house on January 31, 1865. Some of you may have seen a dramatization of the House debate in the movie “Lincoln”.

The text of the 13th amendment is as follows;

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation”.

 In my next sermon you will learn why I want you to hear the text of this amendment. Slavery has been called the Original Sin of the United States of America, because like the Christian doctrine from which the term derives, it marked the entrance of an evil into the life of the republic which is still with us, as St Paul believed, through the disobedience of Adam, sin itself entered the human community and is still with us as well.

In 1619 the first Africans arrived in Virginia, one of the thirteen British colonies which would ultimately become the United States of America. Historians are unclear whether these people were sold as slaves or as indentured servants with a contract for service to some person for a limited period of time. Most indentured servants were Europeans who worked in this manner to pay for their trip to the new world. Indentured servants could however be sold or inherited during the term of their contract and these contracts could be extended for bad behavior. Those who completed their contract not only earned their freedom, they earned what was called “Freedom Dues” which meant they commonly received a piece of land and enough supplies to enable them to begin their new lives.

Apparently, only gradually was chattel slavery introduced and of course limited to black Africans, whose color marked them out for bondage. One of the reasons for the change was the fact that upon completing their contract, indentured servants moved on, requiring a costly replacement. Slaves moved on only at death or sale, and otherwise were owned by their masters for life.

Slaves might also produce children further increasing their value and their master’s wealth. 

For 246 years, from 1619, until the passage of the thirteenth amendment, racial slavery was the context in which the great majority of black people in America lived. The few who were not slaves were for the most part not citizens either. They became second-class people often disbarred from the vote, from education, and from social, political and economic equality by law or custom. One historian has observed that slaves took the place of machines prior to the industrial revolution. You must maintain slaves as you maintain machines, but you do not pay either and neither enjoy rights in any sense of the word. 



Prior to the American Revolution, slavery spread throughout the colonies north and south. As the north maintained small farms and commercial enterprises, wage labor proved more practical and slavery slowly died out.

In the south which remained agrarian and where large land holdings predominated, gangs of slaves worked the land and the institution ultimately flourished and formed the basis of the southern economy. The southern master class came to exercise absolute control over the slaves. As an example, the Virginia General Assembly passed the following declaration as early as 1705. in their native country…shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and indian slaves within this dominion…shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master…correcting such slave and shall happen to kill in such correction…the master shall be free of all punishment…as if such accident never happened.”

Slavery was not only a means of economic exploitation, it was also a means of control. Because in some parts of the south, slaves vastly outnumbered whites, slave holders tried to keep slaves ignorant, and quiescent for fear of rebellions and uprisings of which there were a few. The rebellion in what is now Haiti, in which the slaves wiped out the white population of the colony and established the first Black nation in the world, terrified the American south and encouraged more laws and regulations for their slaves.

While slavery spread across the nation and then retreated in the north as it increased in the south, people north and south, began to take issue with the buying and selling of human beings. While slave holders declared that blacks were less than human or an inferior race for whom slavery was a good, the morality of the institution was called into question. Abolitionist called for the elimination or the phasing out of the institution.

Thomas Jefferson represents the quandary the country faced at the time of the revolution. In the declaration of independence he famously declared that all men were created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights among which were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson also held several hundred slaves throughout his life. He described himself at one time as an abolitionist, but he also believed in the inferiority of the negro. He believed the institution brutalized the slave holder as much as the slave, but he did not believe the country could ever become an interracial society. He was a supporter of the American Colonization society which advocated for the abolition of slavery and the transportation of freed slaves from the US to Africa. Liberia was founded to receive the former slave population of the US.

Many of the founders of the nation held slaves or had done so previously. Nevertheless, they were aware of the contradiction in the fact that they were engaged in a war to gain their freedom from Great Britain, while holding slaves whose freedom they were denying. The Constitution assumes the institution and its continuance. Asked why the founders did not make more of an effort to rid the new nation of this institution of which most of them claimed to disapprove, historians tell us, first that if they had banned the institution there would have been no United States. The southern states would have left the Constitution and the country and no slave would have been freed because most of the slaves were in the south. Secondly, the founders believed the institution was likely to die out in the south as it had largely done in the north . They left it for subsequent generations to resolve what they could not. Unfortunately, the institution did not die out. Rather, it became expansionist. So for the next 74 years the nation struggled with the institution that some wished to abolish and others wished to expand. The struggle led ultimately to th e Civil War.

In 1850 Congress also, passed a new fugitive slave law that put the power of the national government behind the requirement that states where slavery was illegal, were obliged to return runaway slaves to their masters.

I graduated from high school one year before the Supreme Court in Brown vs The Board of Education struck down the doctrine of separate but equal which permitted racial segregation which had shaped my life up to that time. I and my generation saw the High Court as the defender of my rights as a black american. But as I proceed, I think you will discover, as I did, that while the Warren Court befriended the rights of blacks, it was an exception rather than the rule.

Another precipitator of the Civil War occurred in 1857 when Chief Justice Rodger B. Taney delivered his opinion in the case of Dred Scott vs. Sandford. Briefly, Scott, a slave, had been taken by his master into free territory where they had lived for a while. Upon returning to slave territory, Scott managed to sue in federal court alleging that because he had lived in a free state, he was therefore free. Mr. Justice Taney, writing for the Court, denied that Scott had any standing to sue in Federal court at all because, he, being black, whether free or slave, was not a citizen of the United States in the eyes of the Constitution. According to Taney, the authors of the Constitution had viewed all blacks as  “beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”

The decision spurred vehement dissent in the anti slavery forces in the north and is regarded as an indirect cause for the Civil War. This decision was the lowest point of black rights in the US.

The Civil War began in 1861 with the secession of those states that subsequently formed the Confederacy. They seceded they said, because they feared that Lincoln and the republicans who had won the federal election, would abolish slavery despite the fact that Lincoln said his primary goal was to preserve the Union. The Civil War lasted for four years. It began as a fight to preserve the Union, but with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, it became, as the Confederates feared, a war to end slavery. 180,000 black men served as soldiers in that war to gain their freedom, although they were never paid for their service the same as the whites. So furious were the rebels at the arming of blacks, many of whom were their former slaves, that they refused to take black prisoners, either shooting them when they tried to surrender or enslaving or re-enslaving them.

Further the Confederates refused to exchange them for white soldiers, which brought the prisoner exchanges to an end until the war’s end.

Once, I was asked what I found most frustrating about racism in this country. My answer was the racial two step, the racial dance, in which the nation took two steps forward and one step back or the reverse, so that one never got all that one initially expected or was promised.

This process might be said to have begun with General Wm. Tecumseh Sherman’s field order no. 15. Apparently some union spokesman promised 40 acres and a mule to till them with, to some of the blacks who fought in the war and to some of the 200,000 ex slaves who deserted their owners and were put to work by the army as it moved through the south.

At the conclusion of Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea, this field order, invited blacks to take possession of a 30 mile wide stretch of land along the Atlantic coast from Charleston South Carolina to Jacksonville Florida, which had been confiscated from its Confederate owners. Such skills as blacks in the south possessed were generally confined to agriculture and stock raising, so if freedom was to be maintained, they would need to possess arable land. Sherman’s order was for freedmen to build houses, establish farms and to govern themselves. Whites were ordered to stay away. Some 40, 000 blacks proceeded to occupy 485,000 acres along this coast. There is some question as to whether this settlement was to be permanent as the slaves believed, or simply a method to provide temporarily for the vast number of ex slaves that had attached themselves to the Union army as it liberated the south. Unsurprisingly, it proved to be temporary since, Lincoln had been assassinated by this time and President Andrew Johnson cancelled the order.

A couple of weeks ago I read this comment from Henry Louis Gates Jr. about this promise which was the first systemic attempt to mitigate American racism and to provide freed blacks with an economic basis for their freedom:

“Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the US would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property , if they had had a chance to be self sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth.”

And now we come to Reconstruction. In the Gettysburg address Lincoln at one point spoke of ”a new birth of freedom”. Presumably the reference is to the freedom of the slaves, but what that freedom was to look like he does not say. We are aware that originally Lincoln shared the view of the founders that racism was so widespread, in both north and south, that a multiracial society in the US was impossible. He advocated the exportation of the freed slaves to Africa. When he discovered, in conversations with Fredrick Douglas, and other Black leaders that the slaves themselves rejected this option, he did not know what kind of society the freedom of the slaves would usher in. Something else pointed out in the movie “Lincoln”. His assassination relieved him of the problem, but it did not relieve the nation.

After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and the end of the Civil War, the Union army began an occupation of the rebel states where it used its legal powers over civil governments to try to set the terms for the end of slavery and the meaning of the slaves newly won freedom.

Andrew Johnson, now the President, wanted to reintegrate the rebels into the union as quickly as possible. He therefore issued a general amnesty offering political rights and immunity from confiscation for former Confederates who would pledge support to the US in future, and abide by any federal laws against slavery. Under Johnson’s reconstruction plan, the south would be readmitted to the union on the same basis, with the exception of slavery, as had prevailed before the Civil War.

Under his plan the south sent an all white contingent of former confederates, to congress, including the Vice President of the Confederacy, all of whom, of course had fought against the Union.

Congress, led by the radical republicans, refused to seat these men and by rejecting them, indicated that it would undertake the reconstruction of the south instead of the President, which would sweep away slavery, give blacks the vote and create biracial democratic institutions in the south. The struggle between the President and the Congress to reintegrate the south into the Union, had begun, and would continue throughout Johnson’s term in office.

Because the economy of the south was in ruins, one of Congress’ first acts was to create the Freedman’s Bureau, to provide food, clothing, fuel, education and medical assistance for southern blacks and whites in distress. The Bureau also had a program for distributing to the freedman land the Federal government had confiscated, a program Johnson also rescinded.

Meanwhile, the white south, having lost slavery, was determined to keep blacks in their former place as much as possible, and to keep the black codes which had governed the conduct of slaves and free blacks. They also passed new laws to constrain the freedman. They prohibited blacks from buying or leasing land. Blacks were forbidden to bear arms, to attend schools with whites, to sit on juries and to testify in courts against whites. Whites legalized segregation in housing, transportation, education and public accommodations.

When Congress considered extending the Freedman’s Bureau’s life, in support, Thaddeus Stevens, one of the radical republicans, said “We have turned lose four million slaves without a hut to shelter them or a cent in their pockets. The infernal laws of slavery have prevented them from acquiring an education, understanding the commonest laws of contract, or of managing the ordinary affairs of business life. This Congress is bound to provide for them until they can take care of themselves. If we do not furnish them with homesteads and hedge them about with protective laws; if we leave them to the legislation of their late masters, we had better have left them in bondage.”

Subsequently, Congress passed the first Civil Right’s Act. It conferred citizenship upon all persons born in the U.S. with full and equal rights under the law without regard to race or color; made it a federal offense for anyone to deprive a citizen of these rights; specifically gave freedmen the right to vote and sit on juries and ruled out compulsory racial segregation in public accommodations.

President Johnson vetoed the act as racially discriminatory “in favor of the colored and against the white race,” possibly the first claim of reverse discrimination. Congress overrode Johnson’s veto, the first instance of that, in the history of the country. The Supreme Court up held the constitutionality of the Act.

In order to silence the states rights claim that American citizenship and the rights of those citizens were up to each state to decide, Congress passed the 14th Amendment making all persons born in the US, citizens of the US and of the state in which they were born. States are forbidden to abridge the rights or privileges of citizens or to deprive any citizen of life, liberty or property without due process of law or deny any person the equal protection of the law.

All the southern states, except Tennessee voted not to ratify the 14th amendment. The struggle between Congress and the South became violent as white police and civilian led mobs went on rampages killing blacks across the region. In Memphis 46 blacks were killed and 80 more were wounded. In New Orleans 50 blacks were killed and 170 wounded. The u Klux Klan and other organizations came into being in the south to maintain the white supremacy that had ruled before the war.

Republicans swept the election of 1866 and Congress made the existing state governments provisional, required the ratification of the 14th amendment to reenter the Union and required the states to hold new constitutional Conventions with black participation as voters and upholding universal male suffrage. Union forces were sent to reoccupy the south and to divide it into 5 military districts each under the command of a US army general.

Johnson again vetoed the bill and Congress again over rode the veto. The Second Reconstruction Act required the army to register blacks to vote since the white regimes in the south were not doing it. It also barred Confederates from participating in state or local government. 

The back and forth between the President and Congress came to a head when the House impeached the President and the senate failed to convict him by 1 vote. 

Sunday after next. I will continue this story of the struggle of black americans to become equal citizens of this nation.

Those conventions met to redesign the states old constitutions through 1867 and 1868. Blacks compromised on some of the issues such as segregated schools, in order to get public schools started, but stood firm on more basic rights. Subsequently, Republicans emerged with majorities in all the state legislatures but white supremacist Democrats had substantial minorities. 

The proportion of black legislators subsequently elected ranged from 1 percent in North Carolina to 40 percent in Mississippi. Needless to say, “Negro rule”, the South’s great fear, did not materialize. However, during this period, two black senators sat in the US Senate and eight blacks served in the House of Representatives. There were also hundreds of black government officials elected across the south.

When 7 of the legislatures ratified the 14th amendment, Congress was satisfied the south was on its way to establishing republican government and readmitted those states to the Union.

But, to the white supremacists, readmission to statehood meant the return of home rule, states rights and the withdrawal of Union troops. The absence of the military meant that whites could put blacks back in their place. Georgia, for instance, once readmitted, expelled all its black members from the legislature. They appealed to the state Supreme Court which upheld them, but no one would enforce the ruling. The south decided they could live with the 14th amendment by ignoring it.

Through the Klan and other groups, whites kept blacks and white republicans from the poles by threats, terror and murder. They had the bullwhip, the mutilation knife, the torch and the lynch rope. They also had the land, jobs, the money and the force of their traditional status as rulers of the south. Thousands of blacks and white republicans were killed or otherwise kept from the polls.

The 15th Amendment was passed as Johnson left office and President Grant came in. It forbade state action in depriving blacks of the vote, but it did not forbid individuals depriving blacks the vote, which was not an accident.

By Pres. Grant’s second year, all the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union having ratified the 14th and 15th amendments and having established equal rights Constitutions. Nevertheless, the struggle intensified. Congress passed a series of enforcement acts intended to give teeth to the Amendments.

The Klan and others groups continued the use of terror to enforce their will. Congress asked for proof and Grant sent it 5000 documented cases of beatings, lynchings and other acts of terrorism against blacks and white republicans. Congress sent a joint committee to look into the south. That committee report ran to 13 volumes of evidence of actions intended to deprive blacks of their civil rights and to drive the Republican party out of the south. But Congress did nothing further.

Grant’s second term was marred by a general abandonment of civil rights in the south. In 1875 Congress enacted a Civil Rights Act which said that

“all persons in the US are entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of public accommodations etc.”

 The measure was never enforced during the 8 years before the Supreme Court struck it down.

The actions of the Supreme Court made the 14th and the 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Act, dead letters in the south. In US vs. Cruikshank, the Court threw out the indictment of100 white men for the Colfax massacre in Louisiana in which 105 blacks and 3 whites were killed, on the grounds that the amendment only forbade acts by the states and not by private individuals. In US vs. Reese, the Court dismissed an indictment against a Kentucky official who refused to count a black man’s vote. The opinion said the 15th amendment did not give blacks the vote, but merely prohibited the states from restricting that privilege on racial grounds. The amendments remained in the Constitution, but the statutes designed to enforce them were wiped out.

1876 was a Presidential election year. The Republicans nominated Rutherford B. Hayes. The Democrats nominated Samuel J Tilden. After the election there were competing returns from several states. Congress set up a commission to decide the election. The Commission went for Hayes. The Democrats objected, and a deal was arranged. Hayes was confirmed as President and the south which had gone for Tilden, got Hayes’ promise that the Federal troops still there, would be withdrawn. President Grant, who was finishing his second term, agreed.

The result of the “deal of 76”, was that the southern society which reemerged under white rule was comparable to that in the south before the Civil War. All three branches of the federal government agreed not to enforce the constitutional rights of blacks in the south. The Freedman’s bureau was ended. The south refined the black codes. The Republican party was excluded from the south and the whole nation went on to embrace the neo-confederacy’s ideology of white supremacy and to practice gross discrimination in employment, public and private and in the armed forces. The entire nation and our government were structured to keep white people on top and black people on the bottom, for almost another 100 years. The unfinished business of reconstruction made necessary the second reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s.

Now we turn to the century between reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s during which the south re-enslaved black americans by law and custom. and the few women drawn in, this did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was none the less slavery, a system by which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.



We have already noted that when slavery was abolished, the slaves were given nothing, but their freedom, no land to till and to quote Thaddeus Stevens, “without a hut to shelter them or a cent in their pockets.” They were given nothing to sustain them economically, in the land of their birth, unlike the white indentured servants referred to earlier.

Even during reconstruction, the Freedman’s Bureau, in the absence of providing property to blacks, encouraged the freedmen to sign work contracts with their former masters. 

The results were written agreements between whites and mostly illiterate black farm hands filled with provisions aimed at restoring their former subjugated state. Some whites even tried to coerce their former slaves into signing “life contracts”, but even the yearly contracts obligated the black workers to remain throughout the planting and harvesting season in order to receive their full pay and under which they agreed to limitations on personal freedom that echoed the slave laws before emancipation. They agreed not to leave the owners property without a written pass, not to own firearms, to obey all commands, to speak in a servile manner and in the event of violations to accept whatever punishment the farmer deemed appropriate, often the lash.

After the crop was in, tenants and sharecroppers came to the planter on whose land they lived and asked for settlement. Landowners tallied the cost of seed, supplies, rent and every other purchase taken on interest from plantation stores since the previous harvest, subtracted the total from each family’s share of the crop and paid the difference in cash. Aware that any worker clear of his debt might attempt to relocate to another more attractive plantation, planters routinely exaggerated costs and interest so virtually no one could ever clear their debts. Instead they might get a small bonus to celebrate before beginning another crop season on the same land.

Next came the laws outlawing vagrancy and so vaguely defining it that virtually any freedman not under the protection of a white man could be arrested for the crime. Mississippi required every black worker to enter into a labor contract with a white by January 1 or risk arrest. Several states made it a crime for blacks to change employers without that employer’s permission.

The laborer might be denied his pay, half fed, or beaten, but if he failed to keep his contract he was a criminal. There were planters who did starve, mistreat, abuse and beat men to force them to break their contracts in order to get them arraigned before the justice of the peace, in order to secure another year of servitude from the laborer.

In addition to the vagrancy laws blacks were arrested for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks; riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sex or loud talk with white women, or for no demonstrable crimes at all. The intention of these laws was to bind black labor to the whites who benefitted economically from that labor, just as they had from slavery. The punishment for violating these laws in most cases was the prospect of being sold into forced labor.

By the end of the 1850’s prior to the Civil War, a vigorous practice of slave leasing was already a fixture of southern life. Farm production was by its nature an inefficient cycle of labor, with intense periods of work in the early spring planting season, idleness during the growing season and then a great burst of harvest activity in the fall and early winter. Slave owners were keen to maximize the return on their most valuable assets and rented out their slaves wherever opportunities appeared.

By the end of reconstruction every formerly confederate state except Virginia, had adopted the practice of leasing black prisoners into commercial hands. Nearly all the penal functions of government were turned over to the companies purchasing convicts. In return for what they paid the state they received absolute control of the prisoners. They were responsible for keeping them incarcerated. They could punish those attempting to flee, and whip the disobedient, almost without limit. Over 8 decades, almost never were there penalties to any acquirer of these convicts for their mistreatment or deaths.

During antebellum slavery, the slaves were minimally insulated from physical harm because of their financial value. But the convicts of the new system were of value only as long as their sentences or physical strength lasted. If they died in custody there was no legal or financial penalty to the company leasing them. Another black laborer would always be available from the state or the sheriff. So they could be and often were, worked to death.

Forcing convicts to work as part of their punishment for an ostensible crime was clearly legal too. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, the brief text of which I read in my first sermon in this series, specifically permitted involuntary servitude as a punishment for “duly convicted” criminals. Furthermore, whites realized that the combination of trumped up legal charges and forced labor as punishment, created both a desirable business proposition, and an incredibly effective tool for intimidating rank and file emancipated blacks to submit to the system of white supremacy imposed across the south, as well as doing away with their most effective leaders.

County sheriffs and justices of the peace developed special relationships with local companies to supply them with black convict labor. Trials were discouraged. Lawyers for defendants were few. The fee system, with its additional charge for each act in the judicial process or appearance of another witness, was a built-in disincentive to prisoners who knew that each added dollar of their fine and costs would mean additional days held in forced labor in a mine or lumber camp.

All this was predicated on the absolute defenselessness of black men to the legal system, and the near certainty that they would be unable to pay the fines imposed on them. White farmers who had advanced money to black tenants at the beginning of a crop season, began to enforce their debts, not by evicting those who fell behind, but by accusing them of fraud. Facing certain conviction, by a white judge, the tenant would accept responsibility before trial. It was the nineteenth century equivalent of the modern plea bargain you have seen on “Law and Order” or some other TV court drama, in which the defendant agrees to a lesser sentence ahead of a trial, in order to be spared the possibility of a more severe punishment. 

The farmer who brought the action would post a bond for the accused and the laborer would sign a contract to work for the farmer without compensation for however long it took to pay back the loan. This practice came to be called “Peonage.” It was slavery by another name.

Attorneys for those accused of slavery, argued that no federal statute made slavery a crime. Cases of slavery would have to be brought in state court under a law against false imprisonment. But no state jury would convict and Congress made no move to pass a statute outlawing slavery. A Federal judge in Georgia held the state convict leasing system unconstitutional, but in 1905 The US Supreme Court overturned the order saying that the Federal court had no jurisdiction to overturn the system.

In 1909 the NAACP was organized to secure the rights guaranteed in the 13, 14, and 15th Amendments and the elimination of race prejudice in America. 

In the half century since the Civil War, the Federal Government was the one area of American public life where black officials could still be appointed to important public positions such as Postmasters, customs officers and other administrative roles. The Federal Government hired thousands of black workers and in Federal buildings some civil equity with whites was maintained.

In 1912 Woodrow Wilson, an avowed white supremacist, was elected President. He curtailed black appointees in his administration and introduced the demeaning southern traditions of racially segregated work spaces, office buildings and restrooms in Washington D.C. Further, he backed southern demands to be left to deal with blacks and black voting without Federal interference. Another half century would pass before this anti-black regime was cracked by the Civil Rights movement.

At the conclusion of World War 1 black soldiers returning to the US after fighting for the freedom of Europe, hoped to be met with some relief from racial animosity at home. Instead they were met with white race riots in S. Carolina, Texas, Washington D.C., Illinois, and Arkansas and a new wave of lynchings.

Between 1910 and 1940, 6 to 10 million blacks migrated from the violence, discrimination and lack of opportunity in the south to the opportunity, discrimination and the ghettos of the north.

In 1921, John S. Williams of Georgia was visited by two agents of the FBI and in the course of the visit he became aware that he was committing “peonage.” "If you pay a nigger’s fine or go his bond and you work him on your place, you are guilty of peonage.” one of them told him. The agents saw the slave quarters where chains and shackles were used to restrained laborers at night, but aware no Georgia jury would convict Williams for doing what was common among white farmers in the area, they told him not to worry, but not to violate the law further.

However, Williams possessed thousands of acres of farm land and he didn’t want to lose them, so he called his black overseer and told him, “You have to get rid of the stockade niggers.” During the next few days he and his overseer murdered eleven of the black forced laborers to conceal slavery on his property and disposed of their bodies. Only when the decomposing bodies began to surface was there an investigation. Williams and the overseer were tried and convicted of the killings. Williams was the only white found guilty in Georgia of killing a black during ninety years between 1877 and 1966.

Subsequently, several white men were caught in this system designed for blacks, and when their deaths came to light, public outrage rose against the system. In Alabama the total number of blacks arrested on misdemeanor charges and subject to sale in 1927 grew to 37,701. The files of the DOJ contained thousands of allegations of peonage and involuntary servitude which remained unexamined. In 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and realizing the nation’s enemies would exploit the slavery issue, the DOJ began to prosecute the crime. The DOJ prosecuted the U.S. Sugar Co. of forcing blacks into its sugar cane fields. In 1951Congress passed a statute criminalizing slavery in the US, 86 years after the institution had been abolished. And at the end of the war Pres. Truman desegregated the armed forces of the US.

Throughout the South, chemicals and mechanization reduced the need for labor. In 1954, the US Supreme Court in Brown vs. the Board of Education reversed the cynical logic of Plessey vs. Ferguson and the terror regime dominating black life for 90 years began to end. The nation’s racial dance took a step forward once again.

58 years earlier in 1896 the High Court, in Plessey vs. Ferguson, upheld a Louisiana law providing for equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races on its railroad cars. In 1892 a light skinned black man refused to sit in a Jim Crow car. He was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson of the criminal court of New Orleans who upheld the state law. By a 7 to 1 vote, the High Court said that the state law “Implies merely a legal distinction” between the two races. The 14th Amendment enforces the absolute equality of the races before the law. Laws requiring their separation …do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race. The argument against segregation laws was false, because of the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with the badge of inferiority. If this is so,” the Court held “, it is…solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Further, If the Supreme Court had cared to look, they would have discovered no equality in those separate facilities either.

Following this judgment, restrictive legislation based on race expanded steadily until some of it was overturned.

Unlike the commercial sector of Nazi Germany with respect to the Holocaust, the commercial sector of the US has never been asked to account for their roles as primary enforcers of segregation and not at all for engineering the resurrection of forced labor after the Civil War. It was business that policed adherence to America’s racial customs more than any other actor in US society. Banks maintained ubiquitous discrimination in lending practices across the country until the 1960’s, that prevented millions of blacks from obtaining the lines of credit especially for mortgages that millions of white families used to move into the middle class.

Next Sunday I will conclude this story with some suggestions for substantially furthering the black struggle for equality in the US of A.

A PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

• NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, by Thomas Jefferson
• YOUTUBE: Jefferson, Slavery, Reconstruction.
• YOUTUBE: “The Revolutionary Origins of the Civil War, by Gordon Wood
• THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY of June, 2014, “The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• AFTER APPOMATTOX: Military Occupation and the Ends of War, by Gregory P. Downs
• AFTER APPOMATTOX: How the South Won the War, by Stetson Kennedy
• SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME: The Reenslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to WW II, by Douglass A. Blackmon
• UNTIL JUSTICE BE DONE, by Kate Masur
• THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS, by Isabel Wilkerson.
• THE NEW JIM CROW: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, by Michelle Alexander.