That whole system of slavery that formed after 1865 was euphemistically called “sharecropping.” It was in actuality slavecropping. Swapping out the names did not swap out practices.
Black Americans worked the land for others and turned over the majority of their crop to get out of “debt.” They were hunted down and lynched at the smallest accusation simply to terrorize them into silence and political and moral submission, keeping them locked into the land by work and debt. The violent murdering never had trials of the group of whites who killed them until 1981 when the first “lynching” trial occurred.
The modern documentary, 15 minutes long though it feels like hours, “Lynching Postcards: Token of a Great Day,” brings home the atrocity of this period dark period of white brutality in American history. Whites in the south in particular had thrown out both the local law and the biblical law, “Thou shall not kill”, and murdered black Americans with complete immunity as the whole of the federal government stood by for decades and watched. They couldn’t pass a simple anti-lynching bill for over a hundred years after the House passed the first one in 1917 by a vast majority. The senate buried it.
Think about it. 200 anti-lynching bills since for over 105 years until now. All these anti-lynching bill says the same thing: It’s a crime to murder black Americans. Americans. Think about it. The goddamn White Congress and White Senate cannot even make an overwhelming simple moral statement that makes it a crime to kill Americans!!
Americans, black Americans in particular, who were singled out by mobs and hanged or mutilated for political purposes. For the sole political purpose of intimating them to not vote, to crush their voice out. That can’t even say “Thou shall not kill.” It should be a no-brainer. But for these Senators for over a hundred years they faced this moral dilemma and froze. Not out of fear. But out of bigotry, hatred toward black Americans, supremacy.
The thirteenth amendment should one hundred percent be changed to get rid of slavery. It is still being used in American prisons for that purpose.
