Slavery by Another Name (76 page)

Less than two months after the slap on the wrist of Charles Bledsoe,

the naval forces of imperial Japan launched their at ack on Pearl

Harbor. Caught at-footed and unprepared for war, U.S. o cials

frantical y planned for a massive national mobilization. President

Franklin D. Roosevelt instinctively knew the second-class citizenship

and violence imposed upon African Americans would be exploited

and violence imposed upon African Americans would be exploited

by the enemies of the United States. At orney General Francis

Biddle cal ed together his top assistants and shared the president's

concern. Biddle was informed that federal policy had long been to

cede virtual y al al egations of slavery to local jurisdiction—

e ectively guaranteeing they would never be prosecuted. Biddle—

favorite son of an elite Northern family in Philadelphia—was

shocked. He could not comprehend that forced labor continued in

America on more than "a few plantations."11

Nonetheless, Biddle knew that in an al -out war, in which

mil ions of African Americans would be cal ed upon to sacri ce in

a struggle to protect freedom and liberty in Europe and Asia, the

U.S. government had to make clear that anyone who continued to

practice slavery, in violation of 1865's Thirteenth Amendment,

would be prosecuted as a criminal.

Five days after the Japanese at ack, on December 12, 1941,

Biddle issued a directive—Circular No. 3591—to al federal

prosecutors acknowledging the long history of the unwrit en federal

law enforcement policy to ignore most reports of involuntary

servitude. "A survey of the Department les on al eged peonage

violations discloses numerous instances of ‘prosecution declined,’ "

he wrote. "It is the purpose of these instructions to direct the

at ention of the United States At orneys to the possibilities of

successful prosecutions stemming from al eged peonage complaints

which have heretofore been considered inadequate to invoke

federal prosecution." Biddle proceeded to lay out a series of federal

criminal statutes that could be used to prosecute slavery—al of

which had long been available to federal of icials.

He ordered that instead of relying on the quirks of the old anti-

peonage statute as an excuse for not at acking instances of forced

labor, prosecutors and investigators should embrace "building the

cases around the issue of involuntary servitude and slavery"12

Biddle descended from extensive antebel um Virginia

slaveholders in his mother's family and from the most pedigreed

line of lawyers in the country on his father's. His great-great-

line of lawyers in the country on his father's. His great-great-

grandfather, Nicholas Biddle, had served as president of the Bank of

the United States under President James Monroe. Like virtual y

every white American who considered themselves racial y moderate

in 1941, Biddle was more than a pet y racist as wel . In his

memoirs, Biddle chuckled at the speech of a "colored boy" testifying

in a trial early in his legal career. His "vocabulary, from a generous

estimate, could not have contained more than a few hundred

words." He described black babies born in a clinic for unwed

mothers as "exhibiting, like Indians, the glowing beauty of primitive

children." His "colored man, Benjamin …polished brass with the

ardor with which his race always approaches brass and with a grave

friendly dignity helped our guests with their coats and hats after a

dinner party"13

Yet Biddle—especial y when faced with the harsh but truthful

depiction of black life as it would be suddenly projected through

the propaganda of Japan and Germany—fundamental y grasped

that African Americans, no mat er how condescendingly he viewed

them, had been denied the compact of freedom forged in the Civil

War. "One response of this country to the chal enge of the ideals of

democracy made by the new ideologies of Fascism and

Communism has been a deepened realization of the values of a

government based on a belief in the dignity and rights of man,"

Biddle said in one major wartime speech.14 He mounted the rst

modest legal at ack on the southern states’ successful expulsion of

blacks from political participation. Unlike any prior U.S. at orney

general, he recognized the federal government's duty to admit that

African Americans were not free and to assertively enforce the

statutes writ en to protect them. "We determined to breathe new

life" into the dormant civil rights laws, Biddle later wrote.15

The Justice Department's recently formed Civil Rights Section,

created primarily to investigate cases related to anti-organized labor

cases, began shifting its focus to discrimination and racial abuse.

Less than a week into the ravages of World War I , Biddle

explicitly repudiated the legal rationale laid out by Judge Thomas

explicitly repudiated the legal rationale laid out by Judge Thomas

Jones in the 1903 trials that had unwit ingly facilitated so much

slavery across the South in the intervening half century.

"In the United States one cannot sel himself as a peon or slave—

the law is xed and established to protect the weak-minded, the

poor, the miserable. Men wil sometimes sel themselves for a meal

of victuals or contract with another who acts as surety on his bond

to work out the amount of the bond upon his release from jail. Any

such sale or contract is positively nul and void and the procuring

and causing of such contract to be made violates [the] statutes,"

argued Biddle in his memo. Henceforth, he ordered al Department

of Justice investigators to entirely drop reference to peonage in

their writ en reports. They were to instead label every le as

related to what it truly was—what it had always been for the past

seven decades: "Involuntary Servitude and Slavery."16

In August 1942, a let er from a sixteen-year-old black boy arrived at

the Department of Justice al eging that Charles Bledsoe—the

Alabama man who received a $100 ne for peonage prior to

Biddle's memo—was stil holding members of the boy's family as

slaves. Despite the Biddle directive, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover

initial y saw no need to mount another aggressive investigation. The

U.S. at orney in Mobile, Francis H. Inge, was similarly disinterested.

"No active investigation wil be instituted," Hoover wrote to

Assistant At orney General Wendel Berge, at empting to close the

file.17

That would have been the end of the mat er even a year earlier.

But seven months into World War I , with the nation anxious to

mobilize every possible soldier and counter every thrust of Japan's

and Germany's propaganda machines, Berge directed Hoover to

look further. "In accordance with the request of the At orney

General that we expedite cases related to Negro victims, it wil be

appreciated if this mat er is given preference," Berge wrote in a

terse let er ordering Inge into action.18

"The mat er complained of in the instant case is but one of many

"The mat er complained of in the instant case is but one of many

in which members of the Negro race have been the victims. Enemy

propagandists have used similar episodes in international

broadcasts to the colored race, saying that the democracies are

insincere and that the enemy is their friend," Berge wrote. "There

have been received from the President an instruction that lynching

complaints shal be investigated as soon as possible; that the results

of the investigation be made public in al instances, and the persons

responsible for such lawless acts vigorously prosecuted. The

At orney General has requested that we expedite other cases related

to Negro victims. Accordingly, you are requested to give the mat er

your immediate at ention."19

Biddle's civil rights lawyers began to reassess fundamental y the

legal breadth of the constitutional amendments ending slavery, the

Reconstruction-era statutes passed to enforce them, and other

largely forgot en laws such as the antebel um Slave Kidnapping Act,

which made it il egal to capture or hold forced laborers in U.S.

territory where slavery was prohibited.

As the war progressed, the Department of Justice vigorously

prosecuted U.S. Sugar Company in Florida for forcing black men

into their sugarcane elds. Sheri s who col uded with the company

were brought to trial. Before the end of World War I , the federal

courts would rule that slaveholders could be prosecuted for

peonage, even if the debt they claimed a worker owed them was

ctitious. It was a subtle change. But the decision eliminated what

had been a standard defense against the crime—the assertion that

no evidence of a debt between the slave and slave driver existed.

Final y, early in September 1942, a team of FBI agents, highway

patrolmen, and deputies descended on a remote farm near Beevil e,

Texas, to arrest a white farmer, Alex Skrobarcek, and his adult

daughter, Susie Skro-barcek. They were initial y charged in a state

court with maiming a mental y retarded black worker named

Alfred Irving. But a month later, lawyers at the Department of

Justice drew a federal indictment al eging that the pair had held

Justice drew a federal indictment al eging that the pair had held

Irving in slavery for at least four years. They were accused of

repeatedly beating the man with whips, chains, and ropes—so

much so that he was physical y disfigured from the abuse.20

Signaling the special signi cance of the case, a special assistant to

At orney General Biddle actively participated in prosecuting the

trial. He later wrote that investigators found "overwhelming"

evidence that the Skrobarceks "repeatedly horsewhipped the victim

…starved him and otherwise held him in fear."21

The at orneys argued that the century-old Slavery Kidnapping Act

applied to this case of abject involuntary servitude, in apparently

the rst such prosecution since the Civil War. The defendants were

found guilty and sentenced to federal prison. Federal o cials made

clear that the case was intended to send a message that despite any

claims by U.S. enemies, the federal government was nal y serious

about ending involuntary servitude for African Americans.

"The Skrobarczyk [sic] trial and its conclusion undoubtedly wil

be said … to have given a decisive setback to the enemy

propaganda machine …urging …negroes that their proper place in

this conflict is with the yel ow race," editorialized the Corpus Christi

Times.22

Two years later, President Harry Truman's Commit ee on Civil

Rights recommended bolstering the anti-slavery statute to plainly

criminalize involuntary servitude. In 1948, the entire federal

criminal code was dramatical y rewrit en, further clarifying the laws

against involuntary servitude. Final y, in 1951, Congress passed

even more explicit statutes, making any form of slavery in the

United States indisputably a crime.

Reports of involuntary servitude continued to trickle in to federal

investigators wel into the 1950s. But America—however deeply

racist it remained—had begun a profound change. Mil ions of

soldiers—black and white—had witnessed the horror of racial

ideology exalted to its most violent extremes in Nazi Germany.

Thousands of African American men who returned as ghting men,

unwil ing to capitulate again to the docile state of helplessness that

unwil ing to capitulate again to the docile state of helplessness that

preceded the war, abandoned the South altogether or joined in the

agitation that would become the civil rights movement. Throughout

the region, tractors, new chemicals, and cot on pickers began to

radical y reduce the need for manual labor in elds of cot on,

soybeans, and tobacco. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in

Brown v. Board of Education desegregating public schools and

reversing the cynical logic of 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson, sealed

forever that the terror regime which had dominated black life over

the previous ninety years was ending.

It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hol ow

emancipation, the nal delivery of African Americans from overt

slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in

their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors

perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised