Black August is a month-long in memoriam to those who have died resisting inhumane treatment from the 13th Amendment’s Slavery Exception Clause that allows local, state, and the federal government to enslave citizens with crime convictions.
Convict Slave Labor
On August 20,1619, the first English North American slave ship landed in Jamestown, Virginia. On August 2, 1776, John Hancock, the President of The Continental Congress, had boldly written his signature on the official version of The Declaration of Independence, and other delegates followed.
The Civil War in the United States began on April 12, 1861. On January 1, 1863, the 16th President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, “That all persons held as slaves within the rebellious areas are, and henceforward shall be free.” The Civil War ended on
April 9, 1865, and on December 18, 1965, The 13th Amendment was ratified. The 13th Amendment which reads as follows:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
If someone were to tell you that slavery does not exist in the United States, they would be lying. It is explicitly written in the U.S. Constitution that there exists a slavery exception. If slavery can legally be practiced, who would make the best slave? Would it be women? Especially White women? No. The rigors of physical labor would not make women, especially White women, the most desirable choice.
Who would be left? They tried building this English speaking civilization with their Street people and prisoners and found that lacking. They next tried the Native Americans, but that did not work out. There was a reason that 12.5 million Africans we’re imported to the New World to do manual slave labor.
So when the United States transitioned out of private slavery ownership rights to public sector slave ownership, African Americans had already proven to be a known commodity for forced labor. This being the case, we just need to create new criminal laws to put them back in slavery.
These newly created re enslavement laws began immediately after the Civil War ended in 1865. They were given the nickname Black Codes and had their roots in the Slave Codes. According to Encyclopedia Britannica “The black codes enacted immediately after the American Civil War, were intended to secure a steady supply of cheap labour, and continue the inferiority of the freed slaves. There were vagrancy laws that declared a black person to be vagrant if unemployed and without permanent residence; a person so defined could be arrested, fined, and bound out for a term of labor if unable to pay the fine.
The following Section is from a 1865 Mississippi Black Code vagrancy law:
Section 5. Be it further enacted, that all fines and forfeitures collected under the provisions of this act shall be paid into the county treasury for general county purposes; and in case any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto shall fail for five days after the imposition of any fine or forfeiture upon him or her for violation of any of the provisions of this act to pay the same, that it shall be, and is hereby made, the duty of the sheriff of the proper county to hire out said freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to any person who will, for the shortest period of service, pay said fine or forfeiture and all costs.
This state law gave local control to the counties, the specific authority to target African Americans as a labor pool source for slavery. Riddle me this; involuntary servitude, indentured servant, forced labor, all these flowery words to in effect, avoid calling it what it is, slavery! To the man or woman who must labor at the point of a gun, these flowery descriptions don’t mean a darn thing to them. The bottom line, it’s slavery!
Nor are these targeted African American laws a relic of the past. In 1986, the U.S. enacted into law The Anti-Drug Abuse Act.
It established a minimum mandatory sentence of five years for a first-time trafficking offense involving over five grams of crack, as opposed to 500 grams of powder cocaine. In other words, it enacted a criminal liability scheme that $125 of street value crack cocaine, is the moral and criminal equivalent of $12,500 of street value powder cocaine. A low bar entry of $125 to run afoul of federal law is targeting consumers, whereas a $12,500 price tag is targeting dealers.
This criminal liability scheme created racial disparity in sentencing, as it was known at the time of its enactment, African Americans were the consumers of crack, while White Americans were the consumers of powder. African American incarceration rates in federal prison went from 50 in 100,000, to 250 in 100,000. While there was no change in the number of Whites incarcerated in federal prison.
In a 2020 ACLU news article “A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform,” it made the following observation:
Racial disparities vary in severity across states. Colorado has the lowest disparity, at 1.5, while in Montana, Kentucky, Illinois, West Virginia, and Iowa, Black people were more than seven times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than white people. However, one commonality among all states— legalized, decriminalized, illegal — is that Black people are still significantly more likely to be arrested for marijuana than white people. And at the county level, there are places where Black people are more than 20, 30, 40, or even 50 times more likely to be arrested than white people.
These ACLU findings match the widely accepted statistical research; that White America’s involvement in illicit drug activity are at the same levels of African Americans. But nevertheless, African Americans are treated more harshly in America’s criminal justice system.
Convict Slave Labor Conditions
The following was written on a June 17, 2021, by Library of Congress librarian Lynn Weinstein:
While many believe that the 13th Amendment ended slavery, there was an exemption that was used to create a prison convict leasing system of involuntary servitude to fill the labor supply shortage in the southern states after the Civil War. Black Codes regulated the lives of African Americans and justice-involved individuals were often convicted of petty crimes, like walking on the grass, vagrancy, and stealing food. Arrests were often made by professional crime hunters who were paid for each “criminal” arrested, and apprehensions often escalated during times of increased labor needs. Even those who were declared innocent in the courts were often placed in this system when they could not pay their court fees. Companies and individuals paid leasing fees to state, county, and local governments in exchange for the labor of prisoners in farms, mines, lumber yards, brick yards, manufacturing facilities, factories, railroads, and road construction. The convict leasing fees generated substantial amounts of revenue for southern state, county, and local budgets, and lasted through World War II.
The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI), one of the original 12 companies listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Index, was one of the largest users of prison laborers, mostly African Americans convicted of petty crimes. The number of convicts employed increased after United States Steel, the largest corporation in the world at the time (formerly known as U.S. Steel and USX), acquired TCI in 1907. The working and living conditions for these prisoners were brutal, as companies leasing convicts sought to house, clothe and feed them for minimal expense, with little interest in their survival. Justice-involved individuals were housed in rough board shanties unfit for the habitation of human beings. Torture and beatings were common, and countless individuals perished from abuse; poor and dangerous working conditions; communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis, malaria, and pneumonia; and from environmental conditions like contaminated water.
The nominal wages given to the prison laborers “drives honest labor out of employment and into starvation.” Many institutions in the late 1800s and early 1900s employed convict labor as a way to avoid strikes, shortages of laborers, and high turnover. Convict leasing undermines competitive labor markets and decreases living standards by reducing wage and employment rates among the free population. Government use of prison labor can distort incentives for incarceration, particularly in the for-profit prison system. The Coal Creek War was an early 1890s armed labor struggle across Tennessee that was launched against the state government’s convict-leasing system. The labor movement fought against it, because it resulted in suppressing employee wages and increasing unemployment. At the same time, manufacturers rallied against the system, because they could not compete against companies deploying cheap convict labor.
Forced labor took many forms, including convict labor, debtor’s servitude, and peonage. Self-made industrialists of the southern United States, including John T. Milner and James W. Sloss, built their wealth and industries on this labor. Much of the country’s infrastructure, encompassing roads, railroads, buildings, and levees, was built out of this abusive system. See, “The Convict Leasing System: Slavery in its Worst Aspects.”
Others have noted that when the system of involuntary servitude, slavery went from a private enterprise to the public sector, the workforce was treated far better under the private sector system. In the private sector form of slavery, the slave was an investment. The slave was an inheritance. How many people see farmers who rely on the brut labor of the beasts of burden, treat those animals poorly? The well-being and survival of every slave, who did what they were told, was not something to be dismissed so lightly by the small or large business (plantation) owner.
On the other hand, public sector employees had no personal, direct profit-loss fiduciary interest in the involuntary servitude of the prisoner serving time to pay off some debt that is not owed to that employee. Also, these jailers weren’t working, nor present when these convicts were working. African-Americans provide an insatiable and unlimited supply of human capital to private interests under this system.
The Cultural Criminalization of the African American Race
In order for such a system to pass the smell taste, African Americans had to be villainized throughout the media. Prior to the Civil War, when slavery or involuntary servitude was legal by private ownership, the media portrayal of African American males were of a docile lot, full of buffoonery, blissful ignorance, and juvenile angst. This all changed in Post Civil War America at the dawn of the Reconstruction era.
During the 10-year-period of Reconstruction, post Civil War, newly freed African-Americans gained political power through the vote, which led to the elections of Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, as the first two African-Americans sworn in as United States Senators. In education, newly freed African-Americans established institutions of higher learning with the building of schools now known as Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs). It also extended itself into the free markets, prominently on display in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as The Black Wall Street.
These visible displays of a competent African American race, and its resulting mobility were culturally shocking to Southern Whites. These were not their Negroes and had to be stopped; lest the 400-years of brutality visited upon African-Americans by the White race be boomerang back unto the Whites. This fear of a comeuppance, of revenge, was pervasive, and movies such as Birth of a Nation sought to put the genie back in the bottle.
During “America After Ferguson,” a live televised town hall discussion which aired on September 26, 2014, on PBS, and hosted by Gwen Ifill, Dream Defenders founder, African American Phillip Agnes stated the following:
I can sit here with a great amount of empathy for George Zimmerman who woke up every day and saw black men were evil. Every single day since he was a little kid he woke up and saw on television, on cops, on the news, on his TV shows, and videos, that black men will feel with malice and had Criminal Intent in every movement they made.
It was quite apparent from the head nodding, that people found this to be a part of America’s Black conundrum.
In the Journal of Human Behavior, “From “brute” to “thug:” the demonization and criminalization of unarmed Black male victims in America,” it made the following observation:
On April 28, 2015, President Barack Obama referred to a collection of citizens from Baltimore, Maryland as “criminals and thugs” in response to a question about the recent rebellion that broke following the death of Freddie Grayi while in police custody. The use of the term “thug” by President Obama became the zenith of the word’s use to characterize primarily individuals and groups of Black males. In this specific case of the rebellion that began on April 25, 2015, public figures such as President Obama and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake both used the term “thug” along with many news reporters and others on social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. During an interview with CNN, Baltimore councilman Carl Stokes, a Black male, rejected the notion of calling citizens “thugs” by the news anchor that pushed him to agree with the term to describe the occurrences of looting. Stokes responded by stating, “C’mon, so calling them thugs, just call them niggers, just call them niggers” (WSHH, 2015). Councilman Stokes was calling attention to the use of coded language that is in some ways explicitly and other ways implicitly used as a substitute for personally mediated racism, specifically the term “nigger.”
Convict Slave Revolts
On August 21, 1971, George Lester Jackson was assassinated during a prison riot at San Quentin State Prison. Allegedly, George was in possession of a gun that had been smuggled to him. The year prior, Jonathan Jackson, George’s younger brother had been fatally shot while helping prisoners escape from the Marin County Courthouse. George was in San Quentin standing trial for the January 16, 1970, murder of Prison guard John Vincent Mills, at the California Trainig Facility, aka Soledad, along with two other men, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette. They were called the Soledad Brothers and accused of revenge killing Mills in retaliation for the deaths of three African American prisoners three days earlier by prison guard Opie G. Miller. Clutchette and Drumgo were acquitted by a jury for Mills’ death.
Three weeks after George’s death, prisoners at Attica in New York rioted. It left 44 people dead, 33 prisoners, ten prison guards, and one employee. In “Top 7 Worst Prison Riots in the History of America,” it notes: “Riots in prison do not just happen. Most of them originate from inmates’ fury due to their living conditions in the prisons.”
Movement to Abolish Constitutional Involuntary Servitude (Slavery Exception Clauses)
Since the streaming of Ava DuVernay’s documentary film 13th in 2016, Colorado, Nebraska, and Utah have written out of their state constitutions forced involuntary servitude.
Twenty-one U.S. states have forced involuntary servitude written in their constitutions, 26 states do not, and three have removed their forced involuntary servitude from their constitutions. Colorado being the latest to remove their forced involuntary servitude from their constitution.
In a June 15, 2022, Vera Institute article, “Slavery Is Still Legal for Two Million People in the U.S.,” regarding the movement to Amend the 13th Amendment’s Slavery Exception Clause, they write:
People who have been convicted of crimes—especially in the unjust U.S. criminal legal system—remain worthy of dignity and human rights. Attempts to dehumanize incarcerated people and justify their mistreatment and enslavement are an ugly latter day reflection of efforts to dehumanize Black people and justify chattel slavery in the early days of this nation.
In 2022, in California, arguably the most liberal state in the union, the legislature rejected ACA3, a bill to remove their forced involuntary servitude language in their state constitution citing budget constraints. The main proponent of the bill was its highly liberal governor, Gavin Newsome.
On November 5, 2024, Californians will have an opportunity to right this ship by voting Yes on Proposition 6, Involuntary Servitude. According to Ballotpedia there are no known opposition to the passage of the proposition, “California Proposition 6, Remove Involuntary Servitude as Punishment for Crime Amendment (2024).”
Meaning of Black August
The grassroots organization Black Men Build sees Black August as a time to commemorate and honor the revolutionary spirit of those who came before. “It is an act of solidarity with political prisoners and prisoners of war within the hold of the State; it is a practice of discipline and sacrifice; it is a time to remember all those who gave their lives behind the walls and across borders, in the name of Black Liberation; it is not a time of celebration but a time of spiritual and political re-commitment.”
While the clear abuse of the slavery exception clause has been historically and continues to this day to be targeted at African Americans, it is not solely an African American problem. Black August is not an in memoriam for African Americans, it is an in memoriam for all people, especially the poor, who nine times out of ten face a criminal justice system that is unfair and corrupt due to being underfunded and overwhelmed. Once inside one of the gulags of American prisons, they are forced to work demanding physical labor intense assignments. Refusal to do so will only extend one’s stay behind bars.
“I have chosen such a path to refuse to work inside the prison kitchen that I have recently been assigned to,” says California prison artist C-Note. “For one, I am nearly 60 years old, and refuse to give my life force to a government that will kill prison guards, as in Attica, does nothing but make a mockery, or public disgrace of its treatment towards its wounded warriors. Not one prisoner that I know of said that slaving inside the prison has been viewed favorably by the parole board. So if this system (government) treats its own workforce, the men and women of law enforcement and the military like crap, what makes me think I will be treated any better behind breaking my back doing intense labor at 60?” See, “I’m Outraged: The Cruel Reality of Forced Prison Labor and Why Proposition 6 Matters for Every Californian.”
It is suggested by Black Men Build that
each individual is encouraged to observe and commemorate Black August by doing the following:
- Eat healthy, natural, and nutritious foods, beverages, and meals to nourish your body and practice discipline;
- Observe black August through educational study groups, educational events, entertainment, and commemorations;
- Contribute funds and monies made from black August events to men, women, and youth in prison or prisoner legal funds;
- Educate your family, community, and loved ones about what is happening to our people in prisons.
Such a template has likened Black August to a kind of secular Ramadan. The theme of Black August is to study, fast, train, fight, “Study, fast, train, fight: The roots of Black August.”