Life Story Of A Negro Peon Summary

554 Words2 Pages

The Life Story of a Negro Peon (1904) contextualizes the scope and impact of race-based exploitative labor practices in Georgia during the post-Reconstruction South. Through a poignant personal narrative, the Negro Peon recounts how the peonage system undermined his hopes of building material wealth and acquiring land. “We learned that we could not lawfully break our contract for any reason and go and hire ourselves to somebody else without the consent of our employer; more than that, if we got mad and ran away, we could be run down by bloodhounds, arrested without process of law, and be returned to our employer” (340). Alas, this gripping story illuminates how the vestiges of slavery, subjugation, and degradation took root in new forms: …show more content…

What is the value of property-ownership if the Negro cannot draw upon the rich material wealth of his own soil (Du Bois 70)? How does the emergence of an industrial economy in the New South advance the economic interests of the African-American community after Reconstruction? What is the true meaning of progress for the Southern Negro? In The Souls of Black Folk and the Invisible Empire State, W.E.B. Du Bois situated the industrial rise of the New South with the case study of the Georgia Black Belt. He argued that African-Americans’ “lack of capital, land, and economic organization” stifled their potential for economic advancement as wage-laborers in Georgia (Du Bois 102). In chapter seven, Du Bois echoed the sentiments of the Negro Peon about the state of black-white labor relations. “The shadow hand of the master’s grand-nephew or cousin stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rent remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor. Only black tenants can stand such a system and they must” (Du Bois 73). The reign of the white merchant, commissary shops, and the private industry (convict leasing practices) built the New South—building wealth for white creditors, while leaving African-Americans financially

Show More
Related

  • Summary: The Case For Reparations By Ta-Nehisi Coates

    683 Words  | 2 Pages

    Coates author of the article “Case for Reparations” says, “In the seven cotton states, on-third of all white income was derived from slavery. Also, slaves were used as a tool, plus all of the large projects were built in the country by African American people. He states that homeownership and slave ownership stayed similar because they were both properties, and black home owners struggled in the real estate market. Although, slavery was abolished white Americans found new ways to keep black African American population in poverty.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Oshinsky's Worse Than Slavery

    1406 Words  | 3 Pages

    In his book Worse Than Slavery, Oshinsky graphically documents the story of the “farm with slaves” that turned an enormous profit to the state. Throughout the book one is continually confronted with the systematized degradation and humiliation of blacks. Before reading this book I thought I knew the extent of America’s racist past but Oshinsky proved me wrong. There are many dark truths and shameful skeletons I have not encountered before. Parchman Farm with its use of race-baiting techniques and capitalizing on racist fears of black lawlessness as a means to justify political control, violence, and murder is absolutely horrifying. At the heart of Oshinsky’s work, one can see the continual effort of whites to restore their supremacy at all

    Read More

  • Slavery In Woody Holton's Black Americans In The Revolutionary Era

    1667 Words  | 4 Pages

    There are many contradictions pertaining to slavery, which lasted for approximately 245 years. In Woody Holton’s “Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era”, Holton points out the multiple instances where one would find discrepancies that lie in the interests of slaveowners, noble figures, and slaves that lived throughout the United States. Holton exemplifies this hostility in forms of documents that further specify and support his claim.

    Read More

  • The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture

    2143 Words  | 5 Pages

    * Raised on a cotton farm in Dyess, Arkansas, Cash articulated a racialized class divide not simply among whites and African Americans, but among whites, themselves. Cash belonged to a growing class of impoverished white farmers increasingly referred to by his contemporaries as "white trash," and recast by historian Neil Foley as "The White Scourge. " In his book of the same title, Foley analyzes the impact of class and race consciousness on white tenants and sharecroppers in central Texas as they competed for farm labor with both African Americans and Mexicans from 1820 to 1940. Foley asserts, "The emergence of a rural class of 'white trash' made whites conscious of themselves as a racial group and fearful that if they fell to the bottom, they would lose the racial privileges that came with being accepted for what they were not-black, Mexican, or foreign born. "

    Read More

  • Imprisoned in Authority: James Henry Hammond

    625 Words  | 2 Pages

    Hammond’s voice was very loud when it came to the issue of slavery. He was not ashamed to let everyone know how much he supported it. In 1831, Hammond became the owner of a cotton plantation called Silver Bluff. There were 147 slaves at Silver Bluff when Hammond arrived to take possession of it. They were eager to meet their new master. “Hammond had acquired seventy-four females and seventy-three males, a population with a median age of twenty-five. He would certainly have noted that forty-six, nearly a third of these slaves, were not yet fifteen, too young to be much use in the fields but a good foundation for a vigorous future labor force. Undoubtedly, too, he observed that sixty-four of the slaves were between fifteen and forty-five, the prime work years. These were the individuals upon whom Hammond would rely to plant, cultivate, and harvest the cotton and corn that would generate most of his yearly income” (Faust, 71). The rest were older slaves that couldn’t really do a lot of hard labor in the field, but they could do chores that didn’t require such demanding work ethics like watching over the children whose parents are out working in the fields.

    Read More

  • Myne Owne Ground Summary

    901 Words  | 2 Pages

    They argue that the accruing of property by figures such as Johnson meant that they literally did not think of themselves as living within a racist society, and that, despite the decline of this freedom, it is a mistake to consider their opinions as an “aberration” in a narrative of inevitable racial exploitation (Breen & Innes, 112). Rather, they claim that to understand such people as such an aberration inevitably leads to a situation in which the real equality of their freedom is

    Read More

  • Were Black Americans Made Free and Equal by the Abolition of Slavery, 1865-1915?

    677 Words  | 2 Pages

    After the black Americans were freed from their slave masters they did not have ‘a cent in their pockets’ and ‘without a hut to shelter them’ . This obvious lack a home, and the monetary funds needed to support them [the freed slaves] and their families, together with the lack of widespread Government support meant that many slaves continued to live in poverty, and in many ways, they could have been better off (economically), had they been left in bondage . For this reason, many Southern slaves ‘had little choice but to remain as paid labourers or to become sharecroppers working on the land as before’ . Sharecropping, which generally involved the ex-slaves renting land, tools, and a house from a white landlord, working the land that is given to them, and then providing the landlord with one-half to two-thirds of the produce . ‘This system kept the black cotton producers in an inferior position’ , which means that while they were ‘officially free’; they were still stuck in the previous cycle of working for their previous masters, without hope of escape for a better life. While this is what most ex-slaves did, some, like Jourdan Anderson, who left the farm on which he, was prior to being freed, with his family, ‘would rather stay here and starve - and die’ than to have his girls ‘brought to shame by...

    Read More

  • Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X

    1027 Words  | 3 Pages

    Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X, like most civil rights activists, were exposed to the horrors of racism on a daily basis. These two leaders in particular, recognized a recurring theme of conscious oppression of Black Americans on the part of white Americans and identified the ways in which the “dominant” social group benefited from such oppression. Fannie Lou Hamer’s experience sharecropping and within the justice system helped her to develop an ideology of civil rights that centered on the empowerment of Black Americans. When Hamer was six years old the owner of the plantation on which her family lived and worked encouraged her to pick cotton. Making it seem like a game or challenge, the owner offered her a reward of food, knowing that the young girl was going hungry as a result of the limited amount of food he supplied to her family. Just like that, Hamer was tricked into picking cotton to earn minimal rewards.2 This anecdote from her life parallels the struggle of many sharecroppers at the time. Released from slavery, Black me...

    Read More

  • Analysis of Black Awakening by Robert L. Allen

    1871 Words  | 4 Pages

    “Black Awakening in Capitalist America”, Robert Allen’s critical analysis of the structure of the U.S.’s capitalist system, and his views of the manner in which it exploits and feeds on the cultures, societies, and economies of less influential peoples to satiate its ever growing series of needs and base desires. From a rhetorical analysis perspective, Allen describes and supports the evidence he sees for the theory of neocolonialism, and what he sees as the black people’s place within an imperial society where the power of white influence reigns supreme. Placing the gains and losses of the black people under his magnifying glass, Allen describes how he sees the ongoing condition of black people as an inevitable occurrence in the spinning cogs of the capitalist machine.

    Read More

  • 12 Years a Slave

    1194 Words  | 3 Pages

    Northup, Solomon, Sue L. Eakin, and Joseph Logsdon. Twelve years a slave. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Print.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of George Fitzhugh's Cannibals All

    1137 Words  | 3 Pages

    Although he differentiates the practices of economic policy between the North and the South accurately, Fitzhugh fails to interpret what is best for the working future for the American negro due to his lack of insight on slave life. He proposes that there needs to be a protective and governing body over slaves that is not provided in the corrupted North. Fitzhugh considers the freedom and capitalistic influences in the North are responsible for preventing negroes from having the shielded and guaranteed quality of life that the South already allows. George Fitzhugh asserts his reasoning, declaring, “But our Southern slavery has become a benign and protective institution, and our negroes are confessedly better off than any free laboring population in the world” (Fitzhugh, 21.4). His rationale for the best course of action for negroes fails to incorporate education, health care and civil rights that the North promotes in their society. Fitzhugh is absolutely wrong with his anti-abolition opinion; however, he does include a pro-black position intended to financially satisfy the black population. Including an incentive to blacks in this piece reflects the unorthodox approach of Southerners who tend to usually not consider the livelihood of negro slaves. Indeed his appeal is somewhat effective, it

    Read More

  • The Central Theme of Southern History by Ulrich B. Phillips

    1616 Words  | 4 Pages

    Writing around the same time period as Phillips, though from the obverse vantage, was Richard Wright. Wright’s essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the American Historical Society’s annual meeting. His piece is not festooned with foot-notes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips’s, and meant to be published as a complement to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist acceding to a request from a publisher. His essay is naturally of a more literary bent than Phillips’s, and, because he was a black man writing ...

    Read More

  • Slavery by Another Name

    584 Words  | 2 Pages

    For most American’s especially African Americans, the abolition of slavery in 1865 was a significant point in history, but for African Americans, although slavery was abolished it gave root for a new form of slavery that showed to be equally as terrorizing for blacks. In the novel Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon he examines the reconstruction era, which provided a form of coerced labor in a convict leasing system, where many African Americans were convicted on triumphed up charges for decades.

    Read More

  • Of Booker T Washington And Others Summary

    804 Words  | 2 Pages

    Washington 's programme naturally takes an economic cast” (Du Bois). Du Bois believed that Washington’s theory was a gospel of Work and Money that ultimately overshadowed the higher aims of life” Later he makes another statement so powerful that should have made all African Americans want to stand up and fight for a better social status and rights for both the South and North. He goes on stating “The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between the North and South after the frightful differences of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington.” (Du

    Read More

  • Life as a White Man in The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man

    819 Words  | 2 Pages

    "...the effect is a tendency toward lighter complexions, especially among the more active elements in the race. Some might claim that this is a tacit admission of colored people among themselves of their own inferiority judged by the color line. I do not think so. What I have termed an inconsistency is, after all, most natural; it is, in fact, a tendency in accordance with what might be called an economic necessity. So far as racial differences go, the United States puts a greater premium on color, or better, lack of color, than upon anything else in the world."

    Read More

More about Life Story Of A Negro Peon Summary

Open Document