PAGE EIGHT; FEATURE SERIAL SIDE BOX

Although, at the end of the Civil War, the southern states had been forced to comply with the abolition of slavery laws, down on the farm little changed. The south’s acquiescence was to say the least reluctant. While on one hand it had given the slaves their freedom on the other, in total defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment, the southerners systematically deprived the negroes of their civil rights. The ‘Jim Crow’ laws which would prevail until the enlightened reign of the Kennedys, introduced segregation at every level of society and effectively disenfranchised the entire Negro population.
.....Those who remained on the plantations found themselves working under conditions of virtual slavery. Now sharecroppers, they had their own plots to work provided they had paid their labour dues to the Massa first. Although sharecropping had seemed a fair and just system to the ex-slaves it quickly revealed its true nature. Bondage comes in many forms. Every sharecropper received a strip of land to work as his own each with a ‘dog-trot’ cabin, leaky, draughty and rotting. At the beginning of each year each sharecropper would also receive, on credit, all the ‘furnishings’ -- food, household equipment, seed, plough and mules -- to make it all work. The equipment was on hire but the goods were sold outright from the company store. In exchange for this beneficent largesse, the sharecropper contracted for his whole family to work part of each day -- the larger part -- in the Massa’s fields. They would even get a little money for the work they did. At the end of the year, when the crops from the sharecroppers own plot were sold, the debt to the company would be paid-off. That, anyway, was the theory. The reality, however, was far harsher. Contracted to sell their produce through the company store that had funded their enterprise, the crops rarely realised even a small proportion of their true value. After paying off the rent for their farm buildings and the food they had received, most sharecroppers would find themselves in debt to the landowner at the end of the year. As the years passed and the debt grew, the sharecroppers realised that they had been had. Indeed, they were as firmly enslaved as ever.
.....For many, however, there had seemed little option but to remain on the plantations where they had been brought up and where they understood the status quo.
.....Of course, not all remained on the land. In the last quarter of the 19th century there was an increasing movement away from the land. By 1910, slightly under one third of the Negro population had moved away from their home states. Of the one and three-quarter million negroes who had moved on, some had headed towards the West, nearly half a million had gone to the North and the rest had taken to the road in search of work and a new place to set up home.
.....In the post-Civil war devastation of the South, there were railroads to be rebuilt, roads to make and remake, levees and landing stages to build. As the great Mississippi again became a working lifeline into the heart of the South, there were roustabouts and stevedores required to service the massive flat-bottomed steamboats that hauled freight and passengers on the wide river. And if the work could not be found in the South there was a whole country out there.
.....For the more adventurous (not to say, resilient, strong and hard-working) there were ‘the jobs.’ If all else failed, a Negro would eventually find work doing one of ‘the jobs’ that were ‘protected’ for the blacks and the poorest whites. Such work -- whether in the turpentine camps, with the logging crews, on the railroads, in the mines and gravel pits or in the tobacco, fertiliser and cement factories or sawmills -- was almost invariably of an extremely hard physical nature, in dangerous conditions, involving substances and processes that were injurious to health and insanitary and uncomfortable living conditions. In torpid swamps where the humidity and the heat were so dense that one was instantly covered in perspiration, the turpentine workers would ‘gutter’ the eucalyptus, trees extracting the corrosive resin for processing into turpentine or, working from boats, would fell the cypress trees fringing the swamps. Working from dawn until sundown, plagued by swarms of ravening mosquitos, living in camps often fenced in by barbed wire under the crudest conditions and suffering the most miserable privations, their lot was little better than that of a convict working out a sentence of hard labour.
.....For a Negro in the labour camps, the system was not dissimilar to that of the sharecropper. ‘Fixin’ s and furnishings’ -- accommodation and board -- were supplied by the company on credit and deducted from the workers pay at the end of the week. The big difference was that if a worker found himself in debt at the end of the week, he would simply leave. No-one would follow him for there were plenty of others just waiting to step into his shoes.
.....For those prepared to take the long trek to the North, things were a little better. There was work to be had in the great steel mills and manufacturing plants of the northern cities and increasingly the negroes from the South responded to the tales of better prospects and job opportunities. What had been a steady trickle became a sort of flood in 1914 when, with the prospect of war looming over Europe, the flow of immigrants from the old world dried up. For the northern industrialists who were expanding to meet the demands of the impending war and needed cheap labour in quantity, this was a major disaster. In need of workers, they looked to the South. Recruitment Officers were despatched to entice the blacks away from the land and into the cities. The plantation owners, however, were having none of it. Many of the recruitment officers were literally tarred and feathered or seen off at the point of a gun. Black workers who did leave the plantations were forced back by county sheriffs armed with hastily drawn-up laws designed to stem the tide of migrant workers. Despite the best efforts of the plantation owners and the law officers, countless negroes left the land on which they had grown up and lived their lives and, with no knowledge of what to expect, headed for the blast furnaces of Chicago and Detroit. By 1930 nearly half of the Negro population lived in towns.