The daily worker., 1931-02-18
Mr.. Fish and Present Day
Negro Slavery
BY BURCK
BY CYRIL BRIGGS.

WILL Fish and his fellow fascists advocate
" boycott on Southern cotton tobacco. rice,
etc.2 Will they favor proposal to investigate
Negro slavery, through peonage share cropping,
tenant farming, ETC., in the South?
To the lies peddled by these gentlemen on
imaginary forced and convict labor" in the
Soviet Union is added the disgusting spectacle
of gang Of nurderous slave-drivers evoking a
vision of slavery where none exists and pre-
tending to be shocked by the vision while sup
ported and unmoved by the actual existence of
slavery at home
Under the system of land monopoly by the
heirs of the former slave owners, several million
Negroes are today held against their wills on
the plantations of the rich landowners of the
South and Southwest. These Negro workers may
not leave their landlord while in debt to him.
And under the system of landlord supervision
OF crops, landlord cheating on accounts, denial
of the rights to market crops, the Negro farm
workers-share croppers tenant farmers and
farm laborers-are constantly forced deeper and
deeper into debt to their landlord or employer.
Many of these victims are furnished the bosses
by the courts and sheriffs.
Negroes may be arrested for slight offenses
and farmed out to employers"
"On such agreement the contract labor law
allows the planter to hold the convict until the
Problem.")
In the meantime the Negro victim of present.
day chattel slavery in the United States is
charged for food. clothing and money advanced
by the employer and gets deeper and deeper
into debt
Because Of poor Judgment, crop failure, or
other reason he may be unable to discharge his
obligation and virtually ceases to be a free per-
son." admits E. B. Reuter-, Professor of Sociology
In the University of Iowa. In his book 1.-THE
American Race Problem"
"If the offender runs away refuses to work
or disobeys the commands of the master he
may be returned to Jail and this results in the
imposition of a new sentence"
Prison labor is sold to private persons who
work the convicts for labor"
"Peonage and debt slavery are means of secur-
Ing cheap and steady labor"
These admissions are reluctantly made by Reu-
ter in his book. Emmett j. Scott Negro reform
ist and another apologist for the capitalist sys-
tenn, cited the convict leasing system as one Of
the greatest causes Of the mass migration which
reached its peak in 19l9
The convict system by which the courts are
permitted to inflict heavy fines for trivial Of
fenses and the sheriffs to hire the convicts to
planters on the basis of peonage !"
These conditions exist today in the South
anu southwest. Inc posses press mas recently
admitted this The New York Times two weeks
ago published a dispatch from Arkansas in which
1t was admitted that:
''The share cropper can't move to another
plantation unless his debts are assumed by the
new planter"
And again: ~
What the share cropper tenant and small
farmer have been living under for years, is
nothing less than slavery"
This applies to both Negro and white farm
labor, but especially to the Negroes.
The white planter may at any time sell or
transfer his claim in the Negro worker-wllich
amounts to selling the Negro worker.
In many states, this slavery has been legalized
BY the bossesslaws. These laws viii be dealt with
In other articles.