Page 81 - 1619 Project Curriculum

August 18, 2019

t opened in its

mass in the nation. I to seek to establish relations with

current location in 1901 and took white tenants or sharecroppers who

the name of one of the plantations could provide cane for the mill.’’

that had occupied the land. Even By World War II, many black

today, incarcerated men harvest people began to move not simply

Angola’s cane, which is turned into from one plantation to another, but
syrup and sold on-site. from a cane field to a car factory

From slavery to freedom, many in the North. By then, harvesting

black Louisianans found that machines had begun to take over

the crushing work of sugar cane some, but not all, of the work. With

remained mostly the same. Even fewer and fewer black workers in

with Reconstruction delivering civil the industry, and after eff orts in the
rights for the first time, white plant- late 1800s to recruit Chinese, Ital-

ers continued to dominate landown- ian, Irish and German immigrant

ership. Freedmen and freedwomen workers had already failed, labor

had little choice but to live in some- recruiters in Louisiana and Florida

body’s old slave quarters. As new sought workers in other states.
wage earners, they negotiated the In 1942, the Department of Jus-

best terms they could, signed labor tice began a major investigation

contracts for up to a year and moved into the recruiting practices of one

frequently from one plantation to of the largest sugar producers in the

another in search of a life whose nation, the United States Sugar Cor-

daily rhythms beat diff erently than poration, a South Florida company.

before. And yet, even compared with Black men unfamiliar with the brutal

sharecropping on cotton planta- nature of the work were promised

tions, Rogers said, ‘‘sugar plantations seasonal sugar jobs at high wages,

did a better job preserving racial only to be forced into debt peon-

hierarchy.’’ As a rule, the historian age, immediately accruing the cost

John C. Rodrigue writes, ‘‘plantation of their transportation, lodging and
labor overshadowed black people’s equipment — all for $1.80 a day. One

lives in the sugar region until well man testified that the conditions

into the 20th century.’’ were so bad, ‘‘It wasn’t no freedom;
Sometimes black cane workers it was worse than the pen.’’ Federal

resisted collectively by striking investigators agreed. When work-

during planting and harvesting ers tried to escape, the F.B.I. found,

time — threatening to ruin the they were captured on the highway Sheet music to an 1875 song romanticizing the painful, exhausted

death of an enslaved sugar-plantation
worker.
while trying to hitch rides

crop. Wages and working condi- or ‘‘shot at
tions occasionally improved. But on the sugar trains.’’ The company

other times workers met swift and was indicted by a federal grand jury same cane fields their own relatives Lewis and Guidry have appeared in

violent reprisals. After a major in Tampa for ‘‘carrying out a con- knew all too well. separate online videos. The Ameri-

to
labor insurgency in 1887, led by spiracy commit slavery,’’ wrote can Sugar Cane League has high-

the Knights of Labor, a national Alec Wilkinson, in his 1989 book, Farm laborers, mill workers and lighted the same pair separately in

union, at least 30 black people — ‘‘Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane refinery employees make up the its online newsletter, Sugar News.

some estimated hundreds — Fields of Florida.’’ (The indictment 16,400 jobs of Louisiana’s sugar-cane Lewis has no illusions about
were

killed in their homes and on the was ultimately quashed on pro- industry. But it is the owners of the why the marketing focuses on him,
streets of cedural grounds.) A congressional 11 mills and 391 commercial farms he told me; sugar cane is a lucra-

Thibodaux, La. ‘‘I think

this will settle the question of who investigation in the 1980s found that who have the most influence and tive business, and to keep it that

is to rule, the nigger or the white sugar companies had systematically greatest share of the wealth. And way, the industry has to work with

man, for the next 50 years,’’ a local tried to exploit seasonal West Indian the number of black sugar-cane the government. ‘‘You need a few

white planter’s widow, Mary Pugh, workers to maintain absolute con- farmers in Louisiana is most likely in minorities in there, because these

wrote, rejoicing, to her son. trol over them with the constant the single digits, based on estimates mills survive off having minorities

Many African-Americans aspired threat of immediately sending them from people who work in the indus- involved with the mill to get these

to own or rent their own sugar-cane back to where they came from. try. They are the exceedingly rare huge government loans,’’ he said. A

farms in the late 19th century, but At the Whitney plantation, which exceptions to a system designed to former financial adviser at Morgan

faced deliberate eff orts to limit operated continuously from 1752 to codify black loss. Stanley, Lewis, 36, chose to leave a

black farm and land owning. The 1975, its museum staff of 12 is near- And yet two of these black successful career in finance to take

historian Rebecca Scott found ly all African-American women. A farmers, Charles Guidry and Eddie his rightful place as a fifth-genera-

that although ‘‘black farmers were third of them have immediate rel- Lewis III, have been featured in a tion farmer. ‘‘My family was farming

occasionally able to buy plots of atives who either worked there or number of prominent news items in the late 1800s’’ near the same land,

cane land from bankrupt estates, or were born there in the 1960s and and marketing materials out of pro- he says, that his enslaved ancestors

otherwise establish themselves as ’70s. These black women show tour- portion to their representation and once worked. Much of the 3,000
suppliers, the trend was for planters ists the same slave cabins and the economic footprint in the industry. acres he now farms comes from

75