Tell Gov. Barbour to End Plantation Slavery in Mississippi

In rural Mississippi, poor African-Americans are forced to work long hours toiling in agricultural fields they don't own. They pay rent to White landowners to live in small shacks without running water. They are fearful of the White landowners who threaten them with violence and the large debts they and their families have owed for generations. The year: 1861? Try 1961, 2001, and 2010. While modern-day slavery often looks a lot different than the slavery of the past, one researcher has found that for some African-Americans in Mississippi and Louisiana, the 13th Amendments is just a number. But you can ask Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to make freedom a reality for all Mississippi.

Genealogist and television producer Antoinette Harrell has spent the last ten years documenting slavery in the American South. But she's not studying the pre-Civil War, legal ownership of human beings-type slavery of the 19th century. She's studying the peonage and debt bondage-based slavery of the 20th and 21st centuries, which according to her findings is often directly traceable back to pre-Civil War slavery. In many ways, the two models of slavery look the same: poor African-Americans working land owned by Caucasians to whom they are tied through generations of exploitation. In other ways, the models are quite different: instead of legal ownership preventing these workers from striking out on their own, it's isolation, debt, fear, and the inertia of a family history of being beaten down and abused.

“Slavery never ended and that's the point, it never ended. It just disguised itself in other forms,” says Antoinette Harrell.

And she's right. We often talk about historical slavery and modern-day slavery as two unconnected phenomenon that happen to share similar characteristics. But there has been an unbroken chain of slavery in the U.S. and around the world since the 13 amendment abolished the practice in 1865. In Mississippi and Louisiana, African-American slaves became sharecroppers who became workers in peonage who became victims of debt bondage. And that exploitation continues today.

In several counties in Mississippi, African-Americans are forced to work on plantations, beaten, threatened, dehumanized, and held in debt bondage by mostly White landowners. For example, Mae Miller, a native of Mississippi and Louisiana, was a slave for most of her life. Her family was moved from plantation to plantation at the behest of the White owners, where they were beaten and fed scraps from the table. Her family never spoke of the world outside these few rural plantations, never indicated their might be a life for them outside slavery. Miller and her family were kept in this way, as illegally held slaves, until 2001. She still knows several people who live like she did, fearful to make an escape.

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