"The history of Reconstruction and its aftermath is important for two reasons. The first is that it establishes the legal systems that Huddie Ledbetter faced in both Texas and Louisiana. The second is that the South's prison farms were built on the former plantations. These sites had exploited Black laborers first through enslavement and then through various forms of forced, coercive, and exploitive labor practices. This was the case with the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which took its name from one of those plantations. In 1880, three years after the federal troops left Louisiana, the widow of Isaac Franklin sold properties including Angola to a partnership headed by Tennessean Samuel L. James. Since 1869, James and his associates had enjoyed the exclusive right to manage Louisiana's state prison system, meaning that they could exploit convict labor for their own benefit and also lease individuals out, for profit, to work on farms, plantations, levees, and other public and private interests. With their purchase of Franklin's property, and in the absence, now, of federal oversight, they expanded these operations, launching what historian Mark Carleton described as "the most cynical, profit-oriented, and brutal prison regime. Between 1870 and 1901, an estimated 3,000 prisoners leased under the system died."
— Sheila Curran Bernard: Bring Judgment Day, pp. 14-15
"Southern landowners as well as leaders in a range of non-agricultural industries also relied on the unpaid or low-paid labor of convicted prisoners. After emancipation, this was possible because of a clause in the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1865, that prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude "except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.' Prisoners a majority of whom, after the war's end, were Black - were forced to do the most dangerous and undesirable work, putting their lives at risk to extract coal, turpentine, lumber, iron ore, and other materials; clear fetid, snake-infested swampland; and labor in sawmills, brickyards, and endless fields of cotton, sugar cane, and corn. A flagrant disregard for the prisoners' wellbeing led to extraordinarily high rates of death, disease, and disfigurement. If the work itself didn't kill them, the absence of safe housing, nutritious food, clean water, or medical care, and the extreme brutality of white overseers might. If more laborers were needed for a particular task, more could be rounded up. As historian Matthew Mancini reported, quoting a gloating southern delegate to the National Prison Association's 1883 meeting: "Before the war, we owned the negroes.... But these convicts, we don't own 'em. One dies, get another.""
— Sheila Curran Bernard: Bring Judgment Day, pp. 12-13
This racism...
Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) and Martha Promise Ledbetter, Wilton, Conn.
Two unidentified convicts, one of whom is playing the guitar and looks like Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter)
Prison compound no. 1, Angola, Louisiana. Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) in the foreground
50+ Music
Niklas
Hooked On Music
Edward Curtis