American Gulag

The white men and women who attended Mary Church Terrell’s lectures in the early twentieth century were more likely than their neighbors to be interested in race relations and the challenges facing African Americans in the Jim Crow South. Probably more knowledgable too. Still, Terrell found them distressingly unaware of both disfranchisement and convict labor.

Why did Terrell choose these two blind spots, out of the many she likely encountered? Her focus on disfranchisement follows logically from her roles in the women’s suffrage movement and the Republican party. It also mirrors conventional priorities among black activists; the opening paragraph of the Niagara’s Movement’s initial address in 1905 dealt solely with voting rights. But while convict lease stood considerably further down the Niagara Movement’s agenda, sharing a sentence with a call for orphanages and juvenile reformatories, Terrell placed it at the center. Historians have seldom followed her lead, generally considering convict labor as one among many forms of forced labor and racial oppression in the Jim Crow South.

The standard narrative is straightforward. The Civil War ended with southern penitentiaries in shambles and states lacking funds to rebuild. The legacy of slavery rendered forced labor an obvious alternative, in part because most prisoners were black and therefore limited in their rights if not their presumed humanity. Opportunistic politicians eyed the money and patronage that would flow within a privatized corrections system, and the practice of leasing prisoners to either employers or convict labor brokers was born. Convict lease survived into the Progressive Era, when reformers recoiled at the corruption and brutality of the system. At the same time class tensions fed on publicity about the enormous profits reaped by middlemen and the landlords and industrialists who had access to this labor. Viewing the state as the repository of a public interest different from the selfish interests of private enterprise, but untroubled by forced labor itself (as long as that labor was black), reformers shifted the locus of convict labor to the public sector—in Georgia on the chain gang and in Mississippi at Parchman Farm. These institutions endured until the next great wave of reform in the South: the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. The continuity of labor coercion marked by race preserves the South’s peculiarity; the whiggish tale of gradual reform situates the story within the American mainstream.

David Oshinsky’s “Worse Than Slavery” emphasizes the importance of continuity within this framework. An eloquent exposé of southern criminal justice, it is a story of brutality and gore, of men, women, and even children caught in the maw of a barbarous system epitomized by Mississippi’s infamous prison farm. Alex Lichtenstein, on the other hand, is more interested in how the system fit into the larger story of southern economic development. Like Mary Terrell, Lichtenstein considers convict labor of “fundamental significance to the social order” (p. xvii) of the New South—but it is a social order understood primarily in terms of a peculiar form of modernization shaped in part by the racial oppression denounced by Terrell (and Oshinsky).

Twice the Work of Free Labor takes an institution generally considered as an extreme form of racial injustice and coercive labor management and relocates it at the center of New South modernization. The emergence of convict labor was a crucial step in the South’s progression from a postemancipation agricultural society resting on white supremacy as its mode of control to an industrializing economy that required the advantages that “free labor” brings to employers. The system worked because it had something for everyone—or at least everyone who counted. Industry, which in Georgia meant primarily railroad builders (and subsequently mining), could purchase labor as needed and exercise total control over pace, work process...