If he escape to another county, a charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be depended upon to secure his return.
W.E.B. Du Bois
The Public Record
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. He completed graduate work at Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate. He was a professor at Atlanta University and over the course of his life wrote many books and articles. He spent the last years of his life in Ghana and died in Accra on August 27, 1963.
gutenberg.org
If such a peon should run away, the sheriff, elected by white suffrage, can usually be depended on to catch the fugitive, return him, and ask no questions.
Especially is this true in districts where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant class of poor whites, and the Negroes are beyond the reach of schools and intercourse with their advancing fellows.
One of two things: if any way possible, they buy land; if not, they migrate to town.
He muttered to me with the murmur of many ages, when he said: “White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and night and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man sittin’ down gits all.
And to all this must be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a system of unrequited toil has not improved the efficiency or temper of the mass of black laborers.
Without doubt, some pressure was necessary at the beginning of the free-labor system to keep the listless and lazy at work; and even to-day the mass of the Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern laborers.
The net indebtedness of the black tenant families of the whole county must have been at least sixty thousand dollars.
In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hundred tenant families one hundred and seventy-five ended their year’s work in debt to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars; fifty cleared nothing, and the remaining seventy-five…
The landlord therefore demands his rent in cotton, and the merchant will accept mortgages on no other crop.
It is a crop always salable for ready money, not usually subject to great yearly fluctuations in price, and one which the Negroes know how to raise.
The merchant keeps everything,—clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, pork and meal, canned and dried goods, wagons and ploughs, seed and fertilizer,—and what he has not in stock he can give you an order for at the store across the way.