St. Louis Post: Chained slavery continued in South into 1940's

In March 1908, an unemployed black man named Green Cottenham was arrested in Alabama and found guilty of the vague charge of vagrancy.

Unable to pay exorbitant fines and fees that accompanied the conviction, he was sentenced to a year at hard labor and "sold" to a mining subsidiary of U.S. Steel, which agreed to pay his debts in return for his services and sent him in chains into a coal mine.

The vagueness of a charge like "vagrancy" is of a piece with that of "terrorist" or "enemy combatant". It's the racket of nationalism, which is tribalist identity warmed over and disguised with our supposed authority as "democracy". We'd better wake up and throw off nationalist laws, and the capitalist property/ownership system which controls it.

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