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Chain Gangs, Roads, and Reform in North Carolina, 1900-1935

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Chain Gangs, Roads, and Reform in North Carolina, 1900-1935 THOMAS, SUSAN W., Ph.D. Chain Gangs, Roads, and Reform in North Carolina, 1900-1935. (2011) Directed by Dr. Lisa Levenstein. 263 pp. For the first three decades of the twentieth century, dozens of predominantly black county chain gangs proliferated across North Carolina. The camps existed solely to build county roads, a consequence of efforts by the North Carolina Good Roads Association (NCGRA) to create a network of reliable roads in order to improve the state’s economic prospects. As a self-proclaimed progressive non-governmental group, the NCGRA promoted reliance on chain gang labor as a reform that would profit the state and uplift the convicts. While convicts built roads that helped position North Carolina at the forefront of economic progress in the South, rather than benefitting the prisoners, the chain gangs became sites of abuse and degradation. Chain gang convicts often resisted the inhumane conditions they endured, relying heavily on their connection to the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare (SBC), a state agency whose official duties included inspecting penal institutions and making recommendations for their improvement. With the SBC’s assistance, convicts pushed for investigations into the camps and conveyed their messages to powerful politicians and newspapermen who publicized their struggle. Convicts helped shape reformers’ debates as they risked severe punishment and even death by engaging in protest and resistance against the brutality of the camps. By the 1930s, their pursuit of humane treatment came to influence state level efforts to rectify the abusive conditions so long associated with the county chain gangs. CHAIN GANGS, ROADS, AND REFORM IN NORTH CAROLINA, 1900-1935 by Susan W. Thomas A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2011 Approved by Dr. Lisa Levenstein Committee Chair © 2011 by Susan W. Thomas To Randy, Jeff, Elaine, Eli, and Cooper for showing me what is important in life. ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair________________________________________ Lisa Levenstein Committee Members _______________________________________ Charles Bolton _______________________________________ Loren Schweninger _______________________________________ William A. Link ______________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee ______________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS While space does not allow me to name everyone who has played a part in helping me reach this goal, I would be remiss if I did not address the members of my committee individually. Dr. Lisa Levenstein, my mentor throughout this long process, worked with me tirelessly. Her encouragement, generosity, and patience seemed limitless as she helped me surmount personal and professional obstacles that could have prevented me from finishing this project. Each of the remaining members of my committee helped improve this dissertation in innumerable ways. Dr. Chuck Bolton prompted me to develop my ideas regarding North Carolina’s system of jurisprudence and the development of class relations between poor whites and blacks. Dr. Loren Schweninger offered critical advice on positioning African Americans in the context of the times and in relation to the past. Dr. William A. Link pushed me to expand my analysis of progressive reformers, to pick apart who they were and what they believed, and explore how that changed over time in the context of penal reform and Good Roads. I would especially like to express my appreciation to the late Dr. Allen W. Trelease, whose generosity to the UNC-Greensboro Doctoral Program enabled me to complete my research more efficiently than would otherwise have been possible. I also owe a special thanks to Chris Meekins of the North Carolina State Archives. Chris helped me locate sources, never tired of answering questions, and remained cheerful through it all. To my friends, my deepest gratitude for the multitude of ways you made this journey worthwhile. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................1 II. THE PROGRESSIVE DEBATE OVER CHAIN GANGS IN NORTH CAROLINA................................................................................35 III. COUNTY CONVICTS AND THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM ................................91 IV. INVISIBLE RESISTANCE .............................................................................142 V. REBELLIOUS PRISONERS AND STATE CONTROL...............................191 VI. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................244 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................249 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Progress Cannot Travel in Mud. Southern Good Roads, February 1910 From 1900 to 1935, county chain gang convicts helped shaped debates over penal reform in North Carolina. Convicts articulated their needs and expectations through interviews, testimony, and letters, and they agitated against the inhumanity of the chain gang camps. Forming bonds across the socially entrenched and legally constructed racial divide, black and white convicts supported each other in their efforts to focus the spotlight of public attention on problems within the county camps. For three decades, convicts exerted unrelenting pressure against the county chain gang system and forced many North Carolinians to pay attention to their concerns. By the 1930s, their influence helped inform the legislative decision to transfer authority over the chain gangs from the counties to the state. The penal reform struggle that provides the setting for this work was one expression of North Carolina’s multifaceted engagement with the wave of middle class reform activities that swept the nation in the early twentieth century. Reformers of that period reacted to the troubling changes left in the wake of unregulated industrial capitalism’s rapid expansion throughout the northeast during the late nineteenth century. 1 In urban centers, reformers started settlement houses for large immigrant populations; sought to improve working and living conditions for sweatshop and factory employees; helped standardize professions such as medicine, law, and social work; and pressed for efficiency and an end to corruption in local and state politics. Because these progressives pursued such a broad range of interests and were often in positions of leadership, they were able to implement some degree of change in virtually all aspects of life.1 Southern progressivism differed from that experienced in the rest of the country primarily because its methods and goals were predicated on white supremacy and Jim Crow, the legal stratification of society that relegated blacks to second-class citizenship and devalued their humanity.2 Violent campaigns for white supremacy and disfranchisement around the turn of the twentieth century reversed the constitutional gains African Americans had won following the Civil War, depriving the majority of southern black men of involvement in electoral politics and limiting their opportunities 1 Although somewhat dated, the two foundational works on Progressivism are Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1870-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), and Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Random House, 1955). Because of the somewhat amorphous and fragmented nature of Progressivism, some historians have argued that no identifiable movement formed. See Peter Filene, “An Obituary for the ‘Progressive Movement,’” American Quarterly 22:1 (1970): 20-34. Filene’s contentions notwithstanding, however, the Progressive Era remains an active period of historical inquiry. One of the most important recent works to address the period does so from an international perspective; see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 2 The historiography on Jim Crow divides along lines of when and why it officially began. Most historians align with C. Vann Woodward, who argued in The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955) that race relations were fluid in the post-Civil War South until codification of laws divided the races in the 1890s. Howard N. Rabinowitz has argued that not only were there laws in place during the postwar era to divide the races, but that custom was sometimes equally powerful. Rabinowitz contends that what Jim Crow laws replaced was a system of exclusion, not integration, so that in some ways segregation was beneficial to African Americans by offering them opportunities they had previously been denied. See “More than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing the Strange Career of Jim Crow,” Journal of American History 75 no. 3 (December 1988): 842-856. 2 for economic advancement. Beginning in the 1880s, southern whites began passing Jim Crow laws that demanded separation of the races in virtually all areas of life. Aside from these laws, unwritten customs that demanded black deference to whites often held just as much sway as anything enforceable in court.3 North Carolina’s determination to bridge the past to the future began early, as the state’s
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