Life Story Of A Negro Peon Summary

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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

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