The publication of Talitha L. LeFlouria's Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South marks an important milestone in our understanding of how the work performed by incarcerated black females contributed to Georgia's New South identity. As the industrial headquarters of the New South, Georgia's significance cannot be understated. Black female convicts labored in many of the industries that proliferated in the aftermath of the Civil War: brickyards, mines, sawmills, railroads, and industrial farms. Drawing on a wide array of sources, including court records, clemency applications, prison registers, and monthly reports of punishments, LeFlouria brilliantly reconstructs imprisoned black women's lives and traces how private industry and the state ordered the lives and labors of this clandestine population of industrial workers.
Chained in Silence joins works by scholars such as L. Mara Dodge and Mary Curtain in understanding and analyzing the life and labors of black female prisoners, including the extent to which these inmates had to contend with sexual violation. Curtain showed that black female felons were forced to live with men, cultivated bonds with male inmates, and resisted brutal treatment while imprisoned. What sets LeFlouria's work apart is her ability to make explicit links between the rise of Georgia's convict lease system, the output of female prisoners, and the growth and expansion of the industrial South. In Alabama, imprisoned black female laborers overwhelmingly performed gender-specific tasks. Not so in Georgia's system, where black female convicts participated in all facets of prison labor.Footnote 1
Black women convicts' cheap labor essentially allowed for whites to try out new business ventures without “the requisite investment.” Georgia's new economy both moved black women into the prison system and capitalized on their labor once they were there. The devaluation of black women's labor in the postwar open market pushed black females into marginal public spaces and unsafe situations that oftentimes led to their arrest (15–16). Violent crimes, including murder, manslaughter, infanticide, attempted murder, poisoning, arson and assault accounted for 18 percent of all black female arrests (37). The inability to pay related fines oftentimes led to their imprisonment and subsequent leasing to an expanding group of industries (67). In railroad camps, female convicts graded surfaces for railroads, drove carts, and shoveled dirt just like their male counterparts (70). Whipping bosses unleashed naked and seminude floggings to maintain order. At the same time, LeFlouria demonstrates that in some cases “prison was an important conduit by which manufactured goods produced by black women made it to the open market” (108). Broom making, for example, was a gender exclusive enclave that built on training from previous industries (In the agricultural sector, “training” came from their enslavement). Though broom making did not translate into long-term employment, it did allow for deviation from the everyday monotonous labor tasks (107–8).
Presenting incarcerated black women as producers as well as objects of exploitation in the New South's economy, LeFlouria makes a nuanced and compelling case for the centrality of black women's labor “in the cultivation and expansion of the state prison farm” (141). Billed as a humanitarian alternative in Georgia's prison system, these entities functioned “like private lease camps, structured as a for profit-carceral entity” (141). Race and gender assumptions about black women's “hyperproductivity” led state officials to believe that black female prisoners were uniquely qualified for field labor (155). In state farms, black women served in many capacities, including labor substitutes for a handful of white female convicts who were exempted from back-breaking agricultural work (142). For a few, like the resilient Mattie Crawford, who was convicted of murder and profiled in the Atlanta Constitution in 1903, Georgia's state prison farm offered the opportunity to put her blacksmith skills to work and cultivate her reputation as a “trusty” inmate and—perhaps—gain preferential treatment and an improved livelihood (159). Yet, reminiscent of enslavement, gender convention did not protect black female prisoners. They worked from “sun up to sun down” and addressed the medical needs of unhealthy male prisoners. In all of these ways, black female convict labor contributed to the advancement of the Georgia's penal state.
Georgia's carceral state had its critics. Black and white women reformers forged separate crusades attacking Georgia's system of convict leasing. Mary Church Terrell mobilized black female activists from across the country to address the maltreatment of female prisoners in southern states, while Rebecca Felton publicly called for the extinction of the system in hopes of stopping the spread of race mixing (144–45). Free labor advocates argued that convict leasing disrupted the marketplace with cheap labor. These criticisms resulted in the public prison farm, which was believed to be more humane.
State lawmakers abolished Georgia's convict lease system in 1908. Buttressed by farmers interested in “good roads” to transport their goods directly to market (which allowed them to bypass the railways), the good road movement came into being at a time when an economic shift away from railroads, turpentine, and mill work left private firms on the hook for providing for their laborers but no sources of work for them to engage. The state used individuals convicted of misdemeanor crimes to pave the roads of Georgia; cities such as Savannah and Atlanta profited the most from this system. Between 1908 and 1936, some 2,100 black women worked the public roads on chain gangs thus contributing to the modernization of the New South. Thus, while the convict lease system benefited private enterprise, LeFlouria shows how state-run chain gangs also played an important role in building infrastructure.
How did women earn clemency from prison? Sadly, only when their bodies and minds became so broken down that they became an economic burden to Georgia's prison system. Pregnant women might be assigned to domestic work, but for the most part and as in the case of private convict leasing and state prison farms, black women on the chain gangs performed the same tasks as men and boys and were subject to the same punishments. We are left wondering what happened to the women when they returned to their communities. For the few women who did outlive the terms of their sentences, it was all but impossible to adapt the skills they acquired to the open market.
By centering her attention on black women's confinement, Chained in Silence adds a significant dimension to historians' understanding of the social, economic, and political forces at play in the convict lease system and black women's labor history. LeFlouria's unflinching analysis of the emotional toll and dysfunction caused by the constant threat of sexual exploitation will surely inspire important conversations about the extent to which female confinement in post-Civil War America amounted to “slavery by another name.” With the publication of this important study, students and scholars alike have the opportunity to contemplate the relationship between industrial development and the long history of black women's incarceration in the United States.
