Yes, that’s correct. According to the federal reserve report from the St. Louis branch in 1923 which i read on cotton, the production actually quadrupled broom 1860 to 1916. Four times as much was produced and exported. All of that picking was done by black hands picking cotton, and it was done by three methods: sharecropping or what one black history professor in Mississippi called neoslavery; black ownership for the land where they grew cotton; and convict leashing, also known as “slavery or involuntary servitude” according to the 13th amendment. I prefer the term “slavery” but the New York Times yesterday in a great article about convict leasing in Alabama called it “involuntary servitude.” You say toe-may-toe, I say toe-maat-toe, it’s still the same vegetable. The fact is it is forced labor where the laborer is not free from the right not to work or “free from enslavement”, as Alex Liechtenstein, a Florida professor, calls in in his work “Twice the Work of Free Labor” (1996).
The John Deere SF-22 Harvester didn’t come along until the late 1950s to take away the jobs of “sharecroppers” and put small farmers out of business. The 1962 SNCC movie interviewed children like your friend you spoke with and quoted who reported how many pounds cotton they picked in past years. But the JD Harvester never took the jobs away from convict leasing slavery, and in some states black convicts enslaved by the states—Texas, Missouri, Louisiana are examples I’ve researched—are still picking cotton by hand. You read The Atlantic article from 2016 (or 15) and see pictures of black Americans picking cotton by hand. The cotton is then consolidated and sold to one company, Cargill. Cargill a little more than a decade ago bought the British company (sourcing all cotton mainly from India) and the American company (sourcing mainly all cotton from the US) and controlling the international market price, sending the bulk of it to China, but other markets as well. That means that Cargill is still selling cotton picked by enslaved black hands in what is technically according to the US Constitution called “slavery.”
That’s why I say you are correct. Because you are. The word is from the constitution and inserted into it for the first time in 1865 when and ratified December 6, 1865. White people call this “convict leasing” as though it isn’t slavery and doesn’t take its permission from the 13th amendment. But it does. So you’re right, sadly enough. In some places, like on the land of Angola prison in Louisiana, cotton has been picked by black hands for over 180 years. You can call it what you want—“convict leasing,” “involuntary servitude,” “forced labor”, “slavery”—but to the black hand forced to pick cotton on that land during that time, it amounts to the same thing. All slaves are prisons; that is the nature of enslavement after all, to capture black humans and forced to work for free. Cotton is the best example of this horrendous institution.