An exclusive essay by Mumia and Angela Y. Davis: For these many, many people, freedom was but a poor and cruel joke. And the “peonage” system that succeeded slavery kept millions of others in bondage. “Under the aegis of the Freedmen’s Bureau, large numbers of black peasants signed annual contracts with white planters,” the esteemed Black scholars Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame wrote in Long Memory in 1982. “Generally penniless, they obtained advances on their wages or shares of the crop. Since they were illiterate, the planters often overcharged and cheated them. The result was perpetual debt, compulsion, violence, oppression, and de facto slavery. The murder of black peons was a frequent occurrence in the 1940s.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 14:53:54 +0000
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