Author Anatole France once said, "History books that contain no lies are extremely dull." The largely unknown chapter of American history unveiled on Mar. 3 at a "Dinner and a Movie" event sponsored by the Black Graduate Student Association is anything but glamorous. It is, not surprisingly, omitted from many textbooks that provide a fraudulent but friendlier interpretation of history.
At the Johns Hopkins Office of Multicultural Affairs, the BGSA presented Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II, a documentary based on the book of the same name by Douglas A. Blackmon.
The documentary argues that, contrary to popular belief, slavery did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865 that followed the Civil War. Rather, white Southern landowners, unwilling to accept the Union's defeat of the Confederacy and the loss of their slaves, devised unlawful systems that forced freedmen back into slavery.
According to President Nicole Thornton, a Political Science doctoral student, the BGSA showed the documentary as part of the group's ongoing effort to provide a "support network" for graduate students with African-American roots. By orchestrating this program, the BGSA stayed true to its commitment to spreading awareness of pressing cultural issues.
Vice President of BGSA and Chemical Biology graduate student Francine Morris added that within the graduate school community, there are "a couple of black students here and there." Since it appears easy for black graduate students to feel outnumbered by their classmates, mostly of different races, it is important to provide them with a support network by presenting documentaries like Slavery by Another Name that speak to a largely shared heritage.
Unfortunately, a "straight, simple, exploitative system" is part of this shared heritage. The Thirteenth Amendment may have freed thirteen million slaves in 1865, but, as seen on the Library of Congress's website, the Amendment states that if a freedman committed a so-called ". . . crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted . . ." nothing stopped a former slave owner from reclaiming him as a slave. This practice was known as "convict leasing."
In the 1870s, a set of nonsensical laws "criminalized black life," as history professor Talitha LeFlouria puts it and allowed for slavery's reconstitution. Additionally, historian Khalil Muhammad marvels at how simple acts that were misdemeanors, such as stealing a pig, turned into felonies and were grounds for arrest. Worst of all, the federal government did nothing about this disgusting system for so long.
Although illegal, slave owners secretly utilized peonage as an excuse to convict the "criminals" and enslave them. Peonage, or "debt servitude," involved the enslavement of black people because of the notion that they supposedly owed something. In other words, whites argued that since black inmates were unable to pay the exorbitant fines following their arrests, they deserved to be enslaved without due process.
This vicious cycle continued for the next 30 years. The rich became richer at the expense of the suffering of slaves whose freedom had been robbed. Corporal punishment was normal, and slaves were often held beyond the terms of their sentencing. It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century that slave owners were beginning to be indicted for convict leasing and peonage.
However, re-enslavement did not stop there. For instance, although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909, many African Americans were still sharecroppers, giving landowners a share of their crop in exchange for using their land. The President needed to step in.
On Dec. 12, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a strong advocate of rights for African-Americans, signed Circular 3591, which outlawed slavery by any name in the United States.
Once the movie ended and the event's attendees sat down to dinner provided by the BGSA, they gave striking opinions of the documentary and provided insight into race relations at Hopkins.
When asked about her reaction to African Americans' re-enslavement, Tonia Poteat, a Ph.D. candidate at the Hopkins School of Public Health, responded, "I'm not surprised." Poteat mentioned that her family hails from North Carolina and suspected that some of her African-American ancestors were victims of convict leasing and peonage.
Conversely, Chantal Bodkin-Clarke, a Trinidadian graduate student in Hopkins's Cell, Molecular, Developmental Biology, and Biophysics program was surprised that "there was no justice" for the arrested freedmen.
As for racial diversity at Hopkins, both women echoed Francine Morris's sentiment that students of African American descent are underrepresented in the graduate student body and that they often feel uncomfortably "aware of [their] race," as Bodkin-Clarke explained. Hopefully, seeing this film and uniting underneath the same roof provided not only a clearer understanding of the past but also tools with which to build a more racially diverse and supportive school community in the future.
