The African American Labor Market

As we already noted – in the 1800s expediency of slavery was disputed. While industrial North almost abandoned bondage, by the early 19th century, slavery was almost exclusively confined to the South, home to more than 90 percent of American blacks (Barney W., p. 61). Agrarian South needed free labor force in order to stimulate economic growth. In particular, whites exploited blacks in textile production. This conditioned the differences in economic and social development of the North and South, and opposing viewpoints on the social structure. “Northerners now saw slavery as a barbaric relic from the past, a barrier to secular and Christian progress that contradicted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and degraded the free-labor aspirations of Northern society” (Barney W., p. 63).

The introduction of Africans to America in 1619 set off an irreversible chain of events that effected the economy of the southern colonies. With a switch from the expensive system of indentured servitude, slavery emerged and grew rapidly for various reasons, consisting of economic, geographic, and social factors. The expansion of slavery in the southern colonies, from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to just before America gained its independence in 1775, had a lasting impact on the development of our nation’s economy, due to the fact that slaves were easy to obtain, provided a life-long workforce, and were a different race than the colonists, making it easier to justify the immoral act.

After the slaves were freed in 1863, the South had to make changes to supply labor for the farming. Many shady practices by the white man occurred because of this. Sharecropping and crop liens were developed to keep the black man somewhat under their control. Since freed slaves had no money and no place to live, land holders would allow a tenant to live on their property and worked the land in exchange for a share of the crop produced, also known as sharecropping. The crop lien system was a developed to allow farmers to receive goods such as food, supplies, and seeds to be paid for after the crop was produced. This kept the black man and poor white farmers in a constant form of debt.

During the Antebellum period, the American legal system witnessed disparity when there was a massive movement of African Americans out of the rural cities to the urban areas (Crutchfield and Finke, 1983). Another research in other parts of America, prior to the civil war, many whites was imprisoned (Robert, April, and Jorge, 2010). Prior literature on the convict lease systems in postbellum south that aimed at replacing slavery also practiced racial disparity, seen during the using of blacks to work in the field they had worked before as slaves (Adamson 1790-1835;

African Americans didn’t know that is was a Great Depression. African Americans have always been poor and knew how to survive. By 1932, approximately half of black Americans were unemployed, blacks always felt unemployed and under paid. Whites attempted to keep blacks out of work by not hiring African Americans. They used racial violence, and discrimination tactics to keep an underprivileged population depressed.

The long Gilded Age of America started in 1870 and lasted until 1930. It started right after the Civil War and was a period of extreme economic and industrial growth. After the war, a period known as Reconstruction started. The Reconstruction was meant to rebuild the economy of the South. However, the Reconstruction not only didn’t help the South that much, it also didn’t help the newly freed African Americans. According to Eric Foner’s book Give Me Liberty Volume 2, “African-Americans’ understanding of freedom was shaped by their experience as slaves and their observation of the free society around them.” Even after the Civil War, life was still not good for African Americans. One deadly system that was very similar to slavery was the convict leasing system. According to the Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th Amendment outlawed all slavery except ones “ except as a punishment for crime”. Those few words were enough for many people to exploit this by falsely accusing people(many of them African American) of crime and forcing them to work in horrific conditions such as mines and factories. In the Slavery By Another Name video, it told of situations when convicts were through with their time and yet would be forced to stay by the harsh rule of the place they were working at. Many blacks would get sent to prison and then leased for minor misdemeanors or idiotic actions such as stealing a pig or the “Vagrancy Statutes”(from Slavery By Another Name). These statutes basically

The Prison Industrial Complex flourished during the Reagan Administration. It was a way for Corporate America to use cheap prison labor to make huge profits for their corporations. With 42% of the prison population being black and only 13% of the country being African American, it’s easy to realize that the government was exploiting the black prisoners with cheap labor, no union representation, and huge profits that did not get passed on to the prisoners. According to author Michelle Alexander, there are more blacks in prison today than there were enslaved in 1850. This is what she refers to as “The New Jim Crow.” In her argument, she states: “In this era of colorblindness, it was not socially permissible to use race as a tool for disfranchisement, marginalization and discrimination” (Module 9/ Page 6).

Reconstruction did not succeed in incorporating former slaves into American society, but rather complicated the lives of blacks. For example, employment opportunities for african-americans at that time we much more scarce than for the average white. Blacks were usually met with signs saying “Help wanted. Whites Only” and bigotry when seeking employment. Evidently, these facts show that former slaves had little chance of becoming financially stable at the hands of these highly biased hiring

There is no doubt that the United States was built upon the hard work of Black-American slaves, referred to at the time as bondpeople, who were the main labor force in producing important American exports, such as cotton or tobacco, which were, in fact, the backbone of the American economy during that time. Due to bondpeople’s overall importance in keeping the United States the powerhouse that it was, the domestic slave trade was a value market that “‘was roughly three times greater than the total amount of all capital, North and South combined, invested in manufacturing, almost three times the amount invested in railroads, and seven times the amount invested in banks’”(23). In “‘In Pressing Need of Cash,’” Daina Ramey Berry, a professor for the Departments of History and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas, looks at a fifteen year period, from 1850-1865, of the economic factors of the domestic slave trade. Berry uses Steven Deyle’s findings in his study, "Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life” which examined both the "long-distance interstate trade" and the extensive local or "intrastate" trade of enslaved males and females, who were priced differently depending on their perceived market value (23). With Deyle’s findings, Berry specifically discusses the relationships among gender, age, skill, or type of sale and how those factors, generally, determined the priced paid of enslaved workers.

The former slaves considered landowning a large part of freedom, plus they needed territory to plant and crop. White landowners replaced slavery with sharecropping, where the sharecropper borrowed a share of the landowner’s crop and cared for and harvested the crop. The landowner will provide housing for their sharecropper; in return the sharecropper would pay back the amount borrowed plus payment for borrowing, which would leave the sharecropper in more debt. This gave landowners an advantage over their sharecroppers because it made a steady workforce because they were still in poverty and had to repeat the cycle until the sharecropper had enough money to work on his own. This caused a long cycle of poverty for former slaves and poor white

Looking at the social order at the time is important to understanding what is to come. While the slaves were now free and able to do as they pleased, there was still a deeply embedded racism within the minds of Southern whites. Just because blacks had fought in the Civil War did not suddenly mean that the perception of blacks had changed; rather to the Southern elites, they still viewed blacks as inferior and only good for labor, longing to perpetuate the slave system but within a new industrial framework seeing as how the agricultural framework had been destroyed. This new system was to be found in through convict leasing.

The issue of slavery has been in infamous part of American history since it first started in the 1600’s in Jamestown, Virginia. During the colonial era, white male landowners needed help on their land taking care of crops, so they would purchase the African slaves after they arrived by boat and have them work the land as well as other tasks that needed to be done such as tending to

Although the Civil War was the ladder to ending slavery once and for all.. Southern states like Texas, Mississippi and many more. When in doubt these southern states found a ways to encounter cheap labor for their profit. A new process called sharecropping was now on the rise. Sharecropping met within the regulations and didn’t come at the expense of slaves. Sharecropping was becoming the new best thing in the south. Although African Americans were still being targeted as the best workers since sharecropping allowed for payments of lower wages to benefit at the farmers

In the article, Bound Labor in Southern Agriculture, it is explained that despite the freed slaves, African American planters continued to work under cruel conditions and laws were established among whites that stated that as long as you did not hire

The world just then was developing an almost limitless appetite for cotton, and in the deep South enormous quantities of cotton could be raised cheaply with slave labor. Export figures show what happened. In 1800 the United States had exported $5,000,000 worth of cotton 7 per cent of the nations total exports. By 1810 this figure had tripled, by 1840 it had risen to 63,000,000, and by 1860 cotton exports were worth $191,000,000 57 per cent of the value of all American exports. The South had become a cotton empire nearly four million slaves were employed, and slavery looked like an absolutely essential element in Southern prosperity. But if slavery paid it left men with uneasy consciences. This unease became most obvious in the North, where a man who demanded the abolition of slavery could comfort himself with the reflection that the financial loss which abolition would entail would, after all, be borne by somebody else his neighbor to the