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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 10. The Tradition of Slavery - 4. The Tenancy Problem
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Chapter io. The Tradition of Slavery 229
to the transaction whereby an employer pays a Negro’s debt to a former
employer or to a merchant and, by taking over the debt, also takes over
the worker. The police and the courts have often been active in ‘^creating”
the debts by exacting fines for petty offenses or upon flimsy accusations.
Sometimes a number of Negroes are “rounded up” and given out for the
price of the fines to interested employers who are short of labor. More
often the police and the courts only act to enforce an existing situation of
debt peonage.^^
The background of the difficulty of stamping out peonage is the fact
that the South has a weak legal tradition. As we shall show in Part VI,
the police and the courts have traditionally been active as agents for white
employers. Traditionally the planters and other whites have little scruple
against taking the law into their own hands. Threats, whippings, and even
more serious forms of violence have been customary caste sanctions utilized
to maintain a strict discipline over Negro labor which are seldom employed
against white labor. The few laws in favor of the Negro tenant have not
often been enforced against the white planter.
The legal order of the South is, however, gradually becoming strength-
ened. But, even if we assume full enforcement—which is far from being
reached as yet, particularly in the Black Belt where most of the plantations
and the rural Negroes are concentrated—^the entire system of laws regu-
lating the relations between employers and employees in Southern agricul-
ture is heavily stacked against the latter.
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