unsanctioned by law. In its essence it is more degrading than mere chattel slavery. Any one who doubts this may look to modern Mexico for proofs. This peonage in the South had reduced many black men to slavery. And it isn’t stamped out yet. It was on January 3, 1911, that the Supreme Court, in the case of Alonzo Bailey, declared unconstitutional the Alabama peonage law, which had been upheld by the state Supreme Bench. About the same time W. S. Harlan, a nephew of the late Justice Harlan of the United States Supreme Court, and manager of a great lumber and turpentine trust, doing business in Florida and Alabama, was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment and fined $5,000 for peonage. He has since been pardoned and had his fine remitted by President Taft.

One of the forms of this second slavery is the proprietary system, according to which the Negro laborer or tenant farmer must get his supply at the proprietor’s store—and he gets it on credit. The accounts are cooked so that the Negro is always in debt to the modern slave-holder. Some of them spend a life-time working out an original debt of five or ten dollars.

But peonage isn’t all. The professional southerner [9] is always declaring that whatever else the south may not do for the Negro it supplies him with work. It does—when he works for some one else. When he works for himself it is very often different. For instance, there was the Georgia Railroad strike of May, 1909. The Negro firemen were getting from fifty cents to a dollar a day less than the white firemen, they had to do menial work, and could not be promoted to be engineers. They could be promoted, however, to the best runs by the rule of seniority. But the white firemen, who had fixed the economic status of the black firemen, objected to even this. They went on strike and published a ukase to the people of the state in which they said: “The white people of this state refuse to accept social equality.”

[9]

On the eighth of March, 1911, the firemen of the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific Railroad did the same thing. In the attacks made on the trains by them and their sympathizers many Negro firemen were killed. Occurrences of this sort are increasing in frequency and they have a certain tragic significance. It means that the Negro, stripped of the ballot’s protection, holds the right to earn his bread at the mere sufferance of the whites. It means that no black man shall hold a job that any white man wants. And that, not in the South alone. There is the case of the Pavers’ Union of New York City. The colored pavers, during the panic of 1907, got behind in their dues. The usual period 

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