The 13th Amendment didn’t end slavery – but it did fuel mass incarceration | Michael Coard

No. It didn’t- not really, because Section 1 of the 13th Amendment reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States …”

What exactly does that mean?

Well, what that tricky language means is slavery and involuntary servitude SHALL exist within the United States if you’re incarcerated for a crime.

In other words, instead of allowing enslavement and involuntary servitude of people simply because they are Black, the 13th Amendment, by using tricky language, allowed — and still allows — the enslavement and involuntary servitude of people simply because of “racistly” created, “racistly” targeted, and “racistly” enforced criminal laws enacted in and stemming from something called the “Black Codes.”

That tricky language in Section I of the 13th Amendment is the result of the cowardly compromise of the victorious slavery-opposing patriotic North that allowed the defeated slavery-loving traitorous South to co-author the amendment. And those co-authors in Congress incredibly included the former Confederate Vice President, four former Confederate generals, five former Confederate colonels, six former Confederate cabinet officers, and 58 former Confederate Congress members. That explains everything.

Using that tricky language as maliciously planned, the South immediately created the aforementioned Black Codes. Those codes criminalized recently “freed” Blacks by creating and selectively enforcing vagrancy, loitering and curfew laws. They also created and selectively enforced laws that made it illegal for Blacks to refuse exploitative and abusive so-called jobs.

And if Blacks violated any of those or similar Black Codes, they were sent to prisons that “convict-leased” them to 365/24/7 labor on the same plantations and cotton fields and tobacco tracts and coal mines and railways from which they had recently been “freed.”

The Black Codes legislation went into effect beginning in 1865 and up to the early 1960s for the sole purpose of legalizing the criminalization of recently “freed” Blacks along with their descendants and doing so in a manner consistent with the tricky language of the 13th Amendment.

The Black Codes, which were passed in the South with the North co-signing, were part of the one-two punch. The “one punch” was the 13th Amendment’s maliciously racist “punishment for crime” language and the “two punch” was the codes themselves, which succeeded in throwing so-called freed Blacks and their descendants back into slave-like conditions via new criminal laws.

Here are some examples of those laws:

Several southern states had laws that basically re-enslaved Black children by allowing county sheriffs to legally kidnap “free” Black child orphans and “free” Black children of poverty-stricken parents and lease those orphans and children to white owners of plantations, cotton fields, tobacco tracts, coal mines, railways and other penal work camps until the boys turned 21 and the girls 18. For example, in Mississippi, the law was called “An Act to regulate the relationship of master and apprentice … as it relates to … free negroes ….” And although it provided no pay whatsoever to the children, it did provide lucrative payments to the local counties from those exploitatively wealthy white business owners.

Blacks were arrested, found guilty, fined and jailed for vagrancy, which was defined then and is still defined now as “having no visible means of support.”

Those Blacks had just recently been held in slavery, which made it impossible to have earned income and owned property, which in turn meant they could not have accumulated any means of support whatsoever. After being convicted of vagrancy and other contrived charges, Blacks were legally sold into forced labor service to a “master.”

So-called employed Blacks had to sign a one-year labor contract with payment not being provided until the end of that year. Often, there were so many fraudulent deductions by the employer including, but not limited to, for example, fraudulent deductions for rent to live on the company grounds since Blacks weren’t permitted to live anywhere else and for food and other necessities that were available only from the employers’ company store.

These and similar deductions were so exorbitant that the employee wound up owing the employer at the end of the year. It was illegal for Blacks to resist corporal punishment by their employers.