Introduction to Lesson 12

In the early 1830s, he began performing the act that would make him famous: he painted his face black and performed a song and dance inspired by a slave he saw. The unrelenting mockery of the Black experience in America that the Jim Crow character represented solidified a systematic strategy of continued servitude and even a greater sense of inferiority. Under such laws, Southern states imposed a system of peonage SIDE NOTEPeonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867. However, after Reconstruction, many Southern black men were swept into peonage though different methods, and the system was not completely eradicated until the 1940s. Slavery v. Peonage. Black men became targets for white supremacists to impose criminal charges with unbelievably harsh and extreme sentences. In the process of regaining wealth lost during and after the Civil War, many White Southerners forced the newly freed slaves into states nearly as demoralizing and damaging as slavery, and thus plantation work songs became chain-gang or prison songs. Just as many work songs are neither wholly sacred nor wholly secular, the same is true of chain-gang and prison songs. Listen to the song in the video below. The singers are clearly making a petition to God, though the Divine is sometimes referred to as "Captain." The song includes lyrics describing a variety of conditions or concerns but always conclude with "Good God, Almighty."