The violation was known as “vagrancy.” If you were a black man in the South following Reconstruction, and you were unable to show proof of employment on-demand to the police, you could be arrested and delivered into what Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name, called “neo-slavery.”
Beginning in the late 19th century through World War II, various Jim Crow laws required that African-Americans carry pay stubs or, if they were lucky, a letter from an employer; some form of evidence proving to a police officer that they had a job.
Imagine you’re an African-American in the South. Early 20th century. What if you forgot to bring your employment papers with you one day? What if you were unaware of the anti-vagrancy law? Hell, what if you were simply unemployed? It might be your last mistake as a free citizen of the United States. Like so many other African-American men of that era, you might be incarcerated, convicted and perhaps sold to a farming, mining or lumber operation. Yes, sold and ultimately disappeared. This happened long after the Civil War, long after the abolition of slavery and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Slavery, it turned out, survived the war.
Nearly 50 years before Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, a young African-American son of slaves living in Alabama named Green Cottenham was arrested at a train station. We don’t know for sure what law Cottenham had violated to warrant his arrest because, at his trial, the arresting officer literally forgot the reason why Cottenham was picked up in the first place. So the charge of vagrancy was substituted. Cottenham was convicted and sentenced to 30 days of hard labor, but since he was poor and couldn’t afford to pay several intentionally punitive fines, the 30 day sentence grew to a year. He was carted off and “legally” sold for $12-a-month to U.S. Steel. At age 22, Green Cottenham was hustled into a coal mine as a manual laborer; he was occasionally whipped and tortured, eventually dying before the end of his sentence.
Remarkably, however, there’s a malicious conspiracy underway to roll back the mandates of those advancements, 50 years later.
