Some folks think that the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery—WRONG. The 13th Amendment was sabotaged in the South by vagrancy laws, pig laws, and walking along a railroad track law. These laws were passed by southern legislatures after the Civil War. Under these laws Black people and sometimes poor whites were accused of not having a means of income (the arresting of unemployed Black people) and given a monetary fine for vagrancy that they could not afford. They were sent to work off fines back to plantations, some of which were the very plantation that they were held as slaves in what has been described as “Slavery by Another Name” (great research by Douglas A. Blackmon). This system of injustice was also called “debt peonage,” or convict labor, and was used to keep people in bondage. Slaves just released from slavery were often starving and would stela a pig in order to survive. They would be sent back to the plantation that once was a slave farm to work off their sentence.
Thousands of Black people were forced back into slavery using trumped up charges. Once a judge declared a defendant guilty, they were forced into horrible conditions. Some were sent to plantations to do back breaking agricultural work while others were sent to coal mines where they often died from poison gas, heat, and torture when a rule was broken. Extra time could be added to their sentence for infraction of any rule. When many of them died they were buried in mass graves and their relatives never contacted. Many of them were simply kidnapped off of public streets, towns, and railway stations or walking next or on a railroad track. Even those who had jobs were sometimes rounded up and forced back into slavery. The situation became so bad that thousands of Black people escaped from the South and headed North.
The 14th Amendment (equal protection and due process) was sabotaged with all white juries in the case of Black people, Mexicans in Texas, and poor whites. They were victimized by juries that seated only white men with property. In addition to this injustice, Black people almost never could testify against whites and if they did it was ignored by most juries which were all white. The KKK became an American white terrorist group that enforced these laws or racist sheriffs and racist judges. During and after Reconstruction they sought to sabotage civil and legal rights for Black people with terror, lynching, torture, burning at the stake, and burning of entire Black neighborhoods and towns.
The 15th Amendment (the right of African Americans to vote) was sabotaged with poll taxes, violence, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and refusal to allow Black people and poor whites to register to vote. In Texas this was also done to Mexican Americans. Literacy tests often involved using difficult to read medical books while poll taxes required Black people and poor whites to pay to vote if they were allowed to vote at all. After northern troops abandoned Black people in the South, after the Civil War, segregation and violence increased. Sometimes Black men were threatened when they attempted to register to vote by threatening to kill their families. When Plessy vs. Ferguson made segregation legal in 1896, racists erected confederate monuments all across the country. These statues were erected in an attempt to guarantee a white supremacist future and provide a fake history of the Civil War. All of this hatred is still with us with voter suppression and a governor that wants teachers to teach racist lies in public schools.
