An enduring myth

Since 2005, students in the African American history class at Mississippi School of Mathematics and Science have staged a program in conjunction with the Eighth of May, the day Columbus slaves were emancipated by federal troops — May 8, 1865. Through spoken word, song and dramatic performance, the program explores aspects of the local Black community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The program, which this year featured performances by the Columbus Middle School choir, produced something else of value: a conversation about the living conditions and opportunities of Lowndes County’s 16,730 slaves at the time of their liberation.

Addressing that topic, Dispatch columnist Slim Smith wondered about the realities of those freed slaves on the day of their emancipation, noting that while there was an exodus of freed slaves in parts of the South, the Black population of Lowndes County actually increased by more than 5,000 between 1860 and 1870.

Columbus residents Bob Raymond and Dick Leike also took up that topic in separate public forums: Raymond in a Dispatch Letter to the Editor, Leike in a podcast by British journalist Jack Boswell.

It is often said that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

But what happens if the memory of the past is more myth than reality? Do we profit from that?

Each in his own way, Raymond and Leike presented accounts of Black reality before and after May 8, 1865 that distorts history and defies reason.

In his letter, Raymond wrote, “The majority of (freed slaves) returned (to the plantations) after several weeks and signed labor contracts with their former owners. You can judge the quality of life and prewar treatment of the slaves by the percentages that signed these contracts compared to the antebellum census record numbers. It can be assumed that the plantations that lost a large number of former slaves were either run or owned by less compassionate people.”

The idea that large numbers of freed slaves returned to the plantations because they were well-treated by plantation owners, has no basis in fact.

For most, returning wasn’t a choice in any real sense of the word. On May 9, 1865, the suddenly freed slaves of Columbus were penniless, illiterate (it was a crime to teach slaves to read/write), held no property beyond the clothes on their back, had no access to capital and could be forced into virtual slavery through Mississippi’s notorious Black Codes passed that same year, which said Blacks who had no job or assembled with other Blacks could be arrested on the spot for vagrancy. (The law did not apply to white people in the same circumstances.)

If unable to pay the fine (and few were), those arrested could be contracted out to white people who agreed to pay the fine. The law allowed the white employer to charge those unpaid contracted workers for the cost of the fine along with living expenses, ensuring that those held would not be free for months, even years, as those costs accrued for people who were paid no wages. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Slavery by Another Name,” Delta native Douglas Blackmon documented this convict labor practice that continued until World War II.

Freed Blacks didn’t return to the plantations because they had been well-treated. They returned because they had no real choice. Theirs was a nominal freedom because a person who has only one option, has none.

In Boswell’s podcast, “Off The Beaten Jack,” Leike, a descendant of plantation owners, said, “Maybe slavery wasn’t to everybody what it is made up to be today. Maybe it’s not a good analogy, but if you have a good racehorse, you are not going to mistreat it.”

That slaves may have been treated as a “good racehorse” provides no solace. A human being deserves far better than to be treated as a financial asset, livestock or otherwise. Can anyone seriously disagree?

Misleading narratives such as Raymond’s and Leike’s seek to sanitize the real horrors of slavery. They are further evidence of the value of events like the Eighth of May Emancipation Celebration, which are committed to telling the real story of Black America, no matter how disturbing it has been at times.