Well, that sums up what really should happen: an admittance that the word slavery end but the legal practices when on, and on. Black Americans built up new lives throughout Midwest and west until the end of 1880s, where reports indicated they were working with great humanity and decency throughout most counties in some states, like Indiana, Illinois, all the way out to Arizona and California actually. But then the forced exodus started pushing them off their land, usually with a vicious lynching gruesomely displayed based on an unsubstantiated accusation, like rape or stealing.
But really what happened just after the killings receives little attention: for those next forty years, in many many counties, the surviving 12 to 200 or so black Americans who survived were driven out of the towns and counties, and, even less investigated, their land and homes were taken. The value they had invested is unknown, but theft is the real answer. The soil they toiled was most likely reassigned down in the local courthouses being reassigned. That land theft happened in the 15 states of neoslavery (“Jim Crow”) as well. George Floyds grandfather or relative in NC I have heard a detailed account of had their land taken; Medgar Evers father had 85 of 100 acres he rightly owned stolen in Mississippi reassigned—down at city hall. The value of house and home stolen by whites is not known. We know Indiana went from over 30 counties with black American populations to 5 by 1940s, consolidated into key big cities, where “black zones” occurred by city planners. No state except maybe a couple northeastern states were exempted from this forced exodus.
Of course many neoslavery were worse still, not only were black Americans driven out of counties like Forsyth and Marge Green’s home countries in Georgia, but black Americans by the millions were working as ‘agricultural workers’ on cotton plantations and as black American migrants up to and including the 1960s. They were forced into onerous contracts, lived in shacks owned by white land owners (“plantations”), denied basic education, welfare, voting rights with a the same civili rights reductions that the enslaved had. No different. Living conditions were the same: no running water, no heating or electricity, forced to sleep outside on hay in many cases. The atrocity are documented.
Martin King was a blinding success, no doubt, a champion of American democracy surrounded by white landowners conditioned not to let it happen. But he was one of the 4 percent or less that was accepted to high school (not college but public high school, the only one in Atlanta for black Americans as I recall him describing it in an interview). That left 95 percent or more with nowhere to go. Prisons used chain gangs exploiting the loophole in the 13th amendment allowing slavery and indentured servitude for ‘duly convicted’ felons—i.e., black Americans convicted on some minor pretexts. That slavery condition allowed by the constitution was not in the constitution until then.
The word ‘slavery’ was only introduced in 1865 into constitutional language and black Americans were immediately reporting being taken into chain gangs and rented out by sheriffs in Southern states. Such an allowance to do so was given by the slave condition in the 13th amendment, the first time the word entered constitutional law. Many of the accounts of forced slavery—literally slavery—were recorded in the 1880 Senate report and 1500 investigation on federal record. Nothing was done about it. To this day. There are manufacturing factories located in prisons where many black Americans work today, like in Nash Correctional facility, a medium security prison in North Carolina that has one the biggest printing plants on the east coast and an eyeglass plant. Workers might get paid a pittance, like forty cents a day to sweep floors, but that is to avoid the technical term ll slavery and instead call it ‘indentured servitude’ or the language in the 13th.
Wait, who said slavery is over? How about we start by demanding changes to 13th amendment to eliminate “slavery” from being allowed under any condition. Try to do so, as silly as it might sound, and you will political opposition roaring out of think thanks and filling the air waves. It’s like the anti-lynching law, or as I call it the ‘thou shall not kill black Americans law by white men”. Such an easy moral proclamation should have been simple for any president to announce to the nation and pass in Congress. But it took 122 years to pass.
As for your dad, sorry, but I sense he won’t recognize his failings of you. But I wish you the best healing. That much you have the power to do. Thanks.
