Uncovering a little-known system of bound labor in the post-Reconstruction South
After
the constitutional end to slavery in the United States, southern white
landowners replaced labor by enslaved people with systems of bound labor
in which people worked to pay off debts or legal fines. Through the
story of a labor camp in Georgia, Thomas Aiello takes a close look at
the Deep South’s dependence on debt peonage and convict leasing systems
during the post-Reconstruction era and draws attention to a form of
bound labor that has not been discussed by scholars of racialized
incarceration.
At the center of this study is the
Kinderlou labor camp, which was owned by the prominent white McRee
family of Valdosta. In south Georgia and north Florida, debt peonage and
felony convict leasing operated separately from an often overlooked
third system: misdemeanor convict leasing. This system was largely
unregulated by prison officials, leading to abuses of persons with
convictions working in the turpentine industry and the kidnapping of
many Black residents of the area who had never been charged with crimes.
Unlike other work camps, Kinderlou deployed all three systems to
bolster its workforce, making it a unique manifestation of the region’s
exploitative labor operations.
Through deep archival
research, Aiello uncovers injustices that drove local individuals who
were imprisoned to work with federal prosecutors to seek relief and
publicize the abuses they saw and experienced. The nexus of racism,
work, and incarceration seen at Kinderlou is shown here to have been a
form of slavery a half century after slavery’s official “end.” It also
casts a long shadow on today’s carceral system.
Publication
of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the
American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
