Labor bondage in America persisted long past the Emancipation Proclamation.
Vagrancy laws and discretionary policing allowed police in the American South to create convict work crews. They could be rented out to fund the government. Vagrancy laws were an instrument of a larger culture of racial hierarchy and social control of Black Americans.
Herb Rothschild was born and raised in Louisiana. After studying at Yale and Harvard he returned to Louisiana to teach at LSU and assist the ACLU with the unfinished work of the Civil Rights era. He recounts that era in a book, The Bad Old Days, A Decade of Struggling for Justice in Louisiana. This wasn't the distant past. This was my young adulthood. I had only the vaguest of notions of this circumstance and practice.
Guest Post by Herb Rothschild
In Chapter 8 of the book, I recount our ultimately successful efforts to invalidate the unconstitutional provisions of the Louisiana and the New Orleans vagrancy statutes. This excerpt from the opening of that section, plus the footnote in which I provide the facts upon which the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in this area of law was based, illustrate one way that Whites continued to oppress Blacks from the end of the Civil War well into the 1970s.
From the book:
In Europe, vagrancy statutes were enacted after the enormous death toll of the 1348-49 bubonic plague created a labor shortage. They were intended to prevent serfs previously bound to a single master’s land from seeking work on better terms elsewhere. So, too, vagrancy statutes were updated by states of the former Confederacy immediately after the Civil War to regain control of emancipated Black labor. Even the Freedmen's Bureau, which had a mandate to protect Blacks from a hostile Southern environment, cooperated with Southern authorities in rounding up black "vagrants" and placing them in contract work to revive production on the plantations.
Eight of the nine states that used vagrancy laws in this way also instituted convict leasing—the hiring out of convict labor for work on plantations or public works projects. This created a financial incentive for the states to arrest and convict Black men. In 1898, some 73% of Alabama's annual state revenue came from convict leasing. So, using their vagrancy statutes, states like Louisiana were able to reintroduce slavery on a smaller scale. . . .
A legacy of those benighted times was that the vagrancy statutes, which remained on the books, usually were written with a breadth and vagueness intended to give police a pretext to haul into the station anyone they viewed as suspicious. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a Jacksonville, Florida statute—and by extension all such statutes—"for vagueness, in that it ‘fails to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice that his contemplated conduct is forbidden by the statute’, it encourages arbitrary and erratic arrests and convictions, it makes criminal activities that, by modern standards, are normally innocent, and it places almost unfettered discretion in the hands of the police.”Note
For civil libertarians, the vagueness of vagrancy laws was one reason they were defective and unjust. A second reason was that some of their provisions criminalized status rather than behavior, that is, for being something (e.g. unemployed or without a valid address) rather than doing something. As such, they were most often used to harass the poor. . . .
It seemed to us that the Louisiana statute should be declared unconstitutional on both counts—vagueness and wrongly criminalizing status. Regarding the former, among those it deemed vagrant are “Persons who loaf the streets habitually or who frequent the streets habitually at late or unusual hours of the night." Regarding the latter, among the vagrant are “Able-bodied persons without lawful means of support who do not seek employment and take employment when it is available to them."[Note; Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972).] Papachristou consolidated the appeals of eight convictions stemming from five separate actions by Jacksonville police. A portion of the facts presented to the court are worth citing to illustrate the ways vagrancy statutes habitually were used.
Margaret Papachristou and Betty Calloway were white females. Eugene Eddie Melton and Leonard Johnson were black males. Papachristou was enrolled in a job-training program sponsored by the State Employment Service at Florida Junior College in Jacksonville. Calloway was a typing and shorthand teacher at a state mental institution located near Jacksonville. She was the owner of the automobile in which the four defendants were arrested. Melton was a Vietnam war veteran who had been released from the Navy after nine months in a veterans' hospital. On the date of his arrest he was a part-time computer helper while attending college as a full-time student in Jacksonville. Johnson was a tow-motor operator in a grocery chain warehouse and was a lifelong resident of Jacksonville.
At the time of their arrest the four of them were riding in Calloway's car on the main thoroughfare in Jacksonville. They had left a restaurant owned by Johnson's uncle where they had eaten and were on their way to a nightclub. The arresting officers denied that the racial mixture in the car played any part in the decision to make the arrest. The arrest, they said, was made because the defendants had stopped near a used-car lot which had been broken into several times. There was, however, no evidence of any breaking and entering on the night in question. Of these four charged with "prowling by auto" none had been previously arrested except Papachristou, who had once been convicted of a municipal offense.
Jimmy Lee Smith and Milton Henry were arrested between 9 and 10 a.m. on a weekday in downtown Jacksonville while waiting for a friend who was to lend them a car so they could apply for a job at a produce company. Smith was a part-time produce worker and part-time organizer for a Negro political group. He had a common-law wife and three children supported by him and his wife. He had been arrested several times but convicted only once. Henry was an 18-year-old high school student with no previous record of arrest. That morning was cold, and Smith had no jacket, so they went briefly into a dry cleaning shop to wait, but left when requested to do so. They thereafter walked back and forth two or three times over a two-block stretch looking for their friend. The store owners, who apparently were wary of Smith and his companion, summoned two police officers who searched the men and found neither had a weapon. But they were arrested because the officers said they had no identification and because the officers did not believe their story.
Oregon has been notorious for racism...I was raised in a rural area south of Roseburg and our school system had no black kids, although there were good jobs to be had in the lumber and plywood mills...My first job after college and military service (1968) was as a loan officer for a large statewide bank. I spent two years traveling to bank branches from Albany to the California border. There were known (although mostly unwritten) sundown laws for non whites in existence through the late 1960's...Medford was well known as a sundown town. But this was also the case for most cities and towns in SW Oregon.
Here's an interesting comment from the History and Social Justice website (https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundowntown/medford-or/):
A Medford resident writes:
"Medford used to have a sign up by the Medford Armory stating that this was a sundown town, and a KKK member, but that was gone in the late 60’s. There never was bells or whistles. We really didn’t have blacks in this area till the late 70’s when one family got a job at Payless. We would go there just to look at her. She was sooooo nice to everyone. Then she got married and had kids and they went to public school. It must have been hard on them being gawked at all the time. I’ve never heard of bells for the 6 pm curfew." I've lived and travelled throughout Oregon and find prejudice towards non whites to still be a pervasive part of the Oregon heritage....