The 1921 Murder Of 11 Black Farmworkers In Georgia Exposed How Peonage Allowed Forced Labor To Persist Decades After Emancipation
In 1921, 56 years after the Civil War ended, after the Emancipation Proclamation, after Juneteenth, and after women were given the right to vote (White women), John S. Williams still operated a slave plantation in Georgia.
The horror of this is more than just slavery as the owner of the plantation sought to murder all of the slaves before he could be busted by federal authorities.
He used a Black farm hand to murder those that might testify against him. Clyde Manning was the rotten Black sellout who methodically murdered the slaves that worked there.
This horrifying tale of the racist South has yet to be taught in schools across the country. Eleven plantation slaves were murdered in order to keep the white supremacist from going to jail and he used a Black man to do it. We might take note of this as bad Uncle Toms are showing up all over the place in 2016.
Peonage Became Another Form of Slavery
Slavery still existed into the 20th Century in a different form called “peonage.” Vagrancy laws were used, and other invented crimes, to force Blacks to work off a debt on local farms in Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and other rotten southern states that still accepted white supremacy as a code to live by.
White supremacists became more hateful after they lost the Civil War and used almost unbelievable cruelty because they still saw Black people as property to be worked to death.
In many places in the South, Georgia included, downtown areas were loaded with racist statues to the slave owner Confederacy. These statues were meant to erase history by telling the lie that the Civil was not about traitors and brutal slave owners, but about their heroes who were the scum of the earth.
In fact, a one-time Mayor of San Antonio, Ivy Taylor, a Black woman from New York, sought to keep up the false history statues of the Confederacy in Travis Park in San Antonio. She lost the election in part because many felt she sold out the Black community to make racists happy by keeping these hateful statues in place.
Eleven Black Workers Were Murdered
The Black Uncle Tom who murdered them confessed said, “I knocked all them boys in the head and helped Mr. Johnny do away with them others.” One Black slave was “brained with an axe.” John Williams beat many of them as they testified in court by taking off their shirts and showing the deep scars.
The Uncle Tom tied a weight around the neck of two other victims and threw them in a river to drown. After killing others by hitting them in the head with an axe, they were quickly buried to hide evidence. Naturally, the white supremacist John Williams claimed he did nothing. Williams was found guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.
The Black man, Clyde Manning was also found guilty and was also sentenced to life in prison.
The plantation owner killed one of the Black men with a shotgun and buried him right away and planted corn on top so as to further disguise the grave. Keep in mind, that the Black farm boss was threatened with death if he did not brutally murder his fellow men. He had no real courage and like a puppet on a string just followed what the white racist wanted. Uncle Toms like this still exist, supporting whatever Donald Trump and his goons want.
The extent to which people will sell out their own brothers and sisters to make a racist happy is indeed sick.
