Black Involuntary Servitude, Segregation, and Political Exclusion

Once the Redeemer governments of the South regained political control in the late 1870s, they resurrected the labor control features of the earlier Black Codes and imposed new limits on black social and political participation. The "indwelling spirit" of southern race relations law surfaced with a vengeance. Southerners knew "that the laws were intended to maintain white control of the labor force." ⁵⁰

A system of involuntary servitude replaced the shattered law of slavery. Involuntary servitude was not peonage, however. Peonage had a precise and narrow legal meaning: it was the condition that existed when individuals had to work against their will even without a claim of debt. Peonage existed in the South after the Civil War, even though outlawed by the federal Peonage Act of 1867, but it was not widespread.

Involuntary servitude facilitated both the recruitment and the retention of black labor. Like slavery, it was both a social and an economic system. The variety of statutes enacted by southern legislators testifies eloquently to the complexity of the system. Enticement statutes established the property claims of employers to "their" blacks by making it a crime to hire away a laborer under contract to another person. Emigrant-agent laws assessed prohibitive license fees against those persons who made their living by moving labor from one state to another, and a variety of contract- enforcement statutes virtually imposed peonage. Some contract legislation made breaking a labor contract a criminal offense even when no debt was involved. Vagrancy statutes of great breadth permitted police to round up idle blacks in times of labor scarcity and also gave employers a coercive tool that kept workers on the job. Blacks jailed on charges of vagrancy or any other petty crime were then vulnerable to the criminal-surety system, which gave the offender an "opportunity" to sign a voluntary- labor contract with his former employer or some other white who agreed to post bond. Convict-labor laws began where the surety system ended, and blacks who bad no surety often joined the chain gang.

Legally imposed social segregation by race developed in cadence with involuntary

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servitude. When Reconstruction collapsed, the southern states gradually imposed formal segregation. To some extent, the economic degradation of blacks through involuntary servitude settled their social position as well. Yet, even when blacks could make use of public facilities, by the letter of the law they seldom did. The segregation statutes that appeared in the late 1880s and 1890s did not replace a scheme of social integration, but rather one in which blacks were excluded by customary understanding. Legal segregation formalized existing social arrangements rather than creating new ones. ⁵¹

Southerners reimposed white supremacy on every front. State legislatures, for example, mandated segregation on railroads, even though many railroad companies objected to the practice because it added to their operating costs. Arkansas went so far as to segregate voting places. Private citizens, in both the North and the South, placed racial covenants in deeds that prohibited the sale of real property to nonwhites.

Everywhere in the South, black political participation was proscribed. The most common devices were literacy and understanding tests that excluded illiterate and poorly educated blacks, and poll taxes that made black poverty a legal barrier to the enjoyment of political rights. These measures, which were often touted as reforms to promote good government, applied to lower-class whites as well, but states made provision for their exemption, often through so-called grandfather clauses. The Oklahoma version, which was so racially motivated that even the Supreme Court struck it down in Guinn v. United States ( 1915), required voters to be able to read and write any section of the Oklahoma Constitution. But it exempted anybody who was entitled to vote on January 1, 1866, in any country--and anybody descended from such a voter. Of course, blacks could not qualify.

The various exclusionary tests dealt a staggering blow to the black electorate. In Louisiana, for example, the number of registered black voters fell from 127,000 in 1896 to 3300 in 1900.

The Supreme Court approved all but the most racially blatant of these measures. The justices decided by a vote of eight to one in Plessy v. Ferguson ( 1896) that separate but equal facilities were constitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment, upholding a Louisiana statute titled an "Act to promote the comfort of passengers," that prescribed segregation on trains and boats. Justice Henry Billings Brown's opinion for the Court found that laws were "powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences." ⁵² The Court had officially vanquished for the next half-century the antislavery vision of an instrumental rule of law sensitive to higher law principles.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 840