How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

So much so that in 1884 C. Harrison Parker, editor of the New Orleans Daily Picayune, wrote of the men sentenced to convict leasing at Angola that it would be “more humane to punish with death all prisoners sentenced to a longer period than six years” since the average prisoner sentenced to convict leasing would not live more than six years anyway. As one man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction in 1883, “Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own ’em. One dies, get another.”