First of all, have you heard of the orphan train? As America transitioned more and more from an agricultural society to an industrial one, the populations of cities swelled, and so the number of homeless persons swelled too.  This was back when there was no such thing as a social safety net (besides the church), and certainly no such thing as a foster home or adoption. Adoption is a relatively new, 20th century thing. After the industrial revolution, people on the east coast started to fret about what to do about all the street kids with no jobs, no homes, and no families. Well one thing that was tried on an actually pretty significant scale was to round these kids up, put them on trains, and ship them out west. The train would stop, and the kids would be given to farmers to use as domestic servants. They were forced to work, and they were not adopted. They did not become legal heirs like one’s biological children, and when they turned 18, they would be emancipated. In some cities they were displayed on stages, etc. If you weren’t chosen, you got back on the train and went on to the next city. In the early days, abolitionists attacked it as another kind of slavery, and pro-slavery people mistrusted it as something that might make chattel slavery of blacks less necessary. This went on between the 1850s to the 1920s. I learned about it this summer in a book I read called the “Baby Thief” which explores the history of adoption in this country as it evolved from non-existence to institutionalized kidnapping, slavery, and class-based cultural genocide to what it is today, which is much more positive.

Second of all, if you haven’t read the 13th amendment recently, take another look. It has an exception clause. I read a prison-reform book a few years ago by Black Panther/Communist/accused terrorist/UCLA Professor Angela Davis  called “Are Prisons Obsolete?”. In it she argues that the 13th amendment altered but did not end slavery. The 13th amendment reads in part “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime… shall exist…”

After the 13th amendment, slavery was still legal, but you had to be serving a criminal sentence to be a slave. There was a trio of structures in place that perpetuated slavery shortly after the 13th amendment: The prison, the convict leasing system, and Black Codes.  Black Codes were laws that made things like “being unemployed” a crime, but only if you were black. The convict leasing system allowed the state to lease out prison inmates for labor to private businesses. Davis said that in some ways, convict leasing was harsher than chattel slavery, because these private businesses didn’t even care if you were worked to death or killed in an accident, because it was no financial loss to them; the state would just provide a replacement laborer under the contract. The businesses had to pay the state for the lease, but you know, but from the workers’ perspective, it was involuntary servitude, and this was legal because the 13th amendment allowed involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. Virginia’s courts were saying that inmates were “slaves of the state” in 1871 in Ruffin, and didn’t expressly reverse this proposition until Chalmers v Winston in 2000. Two-fucking-thousand!

The Black Codes were dismantled under northern military rule of the south during radical reconstruction. But convict leasing continued into the 1920s, and then the chain gang continued after that until the 1950s. From the 20s to the 50s, the chain gang was a form of forced, involuntary servitude, again, legal under the 13th amendment, but the labor was done for the benefit of the state rather than for private companies. While sometimes the labor was just punishment, and not actually beneficial to the state (like digging ditches and then filling them back in), it was still forced labor.

The chain gang faded out after the 50s (with some experimentation in bringing it back in Alabama in the 90s), but we still have vestiges of economic exploitation of persons of color through the prison system. Instead of Black Codes, we have “racial profiling”, disparate sentencing, racist juries, and unequal access to good legal representation that operate to place a disproportionate number of persons of color in prisons.

Today, prisoners are typically paid for their labor, and their labor is “voluntary” in a way, but minimum wage laws do not apply in jail. Typically prisoners earn somewhere between 10 cents to a 1.00 an hour. Sometimes they are not actually paid, but get time off their sentence, as mentioned in this article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/25/AR2010042503084.html

If they are paid, they can save their money, or they can spend it at prison commisaries which operate with very healthy profits. Some of this I know not from Davis’ book, but from a few months’ time that I was a temp worker in a jail. I handled these commisary orders and noticed that within the jail, the county was using prisoners as cheap janitors. Prison labor is a multi-billion dollar industry, and I think the level of exploitation and level of control over these persons is perhaps not strictly slavery, but it’s a part of a continuing, unbroken evolution of race-based servitude in America spanning from chattel slavery that started with Christopher Columbus in the 1490s all the way to 1865, and up through the prison-industrial state of 2010.

Judge Taney wrote at length in Scott v. Sanford about how slaves were not real citizens and thus did not enjoy all the rights of citizens. Today, after an inmate serves out their full sentence, they often still do not enjoy all the rights of citizenship.  Felons cannot own guns, and felons in a good handful of states are permanently barred from voting. Where they are not permanently barred, it’s still often a hassle. Children as well are “persons” but they don’t have all the rights of full citizenship. Do I think that children should vote or that felons should be able to own handguns?  I am not sure. My point is that we still justify certain things today that rest on logic very similar to the logic Judge Taney used in Scott v. Sandford. It’s not as if we made mistakes as a country in our history and then we learned from them. Talking about this history isn’t important because we need to “learn from our mistakes so we can avoid repeating them.” You can’t “avoid repeating” something you’ve never stopped doing. Instead, I think it’s important to talk about history so that we can better understand why things are the way they are. It’s only then that we can actually stop doing what we’re doing, and then after we stop, then we can avoid repeating.