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THE AMERICAN-SC AN DIN A VI AN REVIEW 
Mississippi, a sheriff would not so tamely permit a white mob to lynch a colored man, 
for instead of depending absolutely upon white people for his re-election, at least 
half of his electorate would be colored. 
Peonage. This evil is a natural descendant of slavery, and is really a form of 
involuntary servitude. It is a system of debt-slavery. The debtor is bound to the 
creditor until the debt is paid, but the large plantation-owners of the south and espe¬ 
cially of the Mississippi Valley often so manipulate the matter of wages and prices 
as to keep the ignorant or helpless colored “peons” in debt, and consequently in 
bondage. It is contrary to the national constitution that a man’s body should be held 
for any debt which he honestly contracts, but far in the backwoods and rural districts 
of the south, this thing is done in defiance of law or in ignorance of it. Some of the 
states made “contract labor laws” which indirectly sustained this peonage system 
by making the laborer subject to fine and imprisonment if he should run away from 
his employer after signing a contract to work for a specified period and receiving 
any advance payment or goods by virtue of such agreement. It is very simple to 
entrap the ignorant or the needy by making him a small advance payment or vouch¬ 
ing for his credit at some store, after he has signed a contract to do farm work for a 
year; and then his enslavement can be made perpetual by fixing his wages low and 
making the cost of his living high, for he must get all his goods through his employer 
and often from the employer’s own store. Agents of the Federal government and of 
some of the southern state governments are ferreting out these law-breakers and en¬ 
slavers. It was the activity of these agents of justice which so frightened John 
Williams, a white planter of Georgia, that he killed from a dozen to twenty of his 
peons in 1921, in an effort to cover up his crime of having held them illegally bound. 
Sometimes these peons are secured in another way: the white planter will pay 
the fines of Negroes who have been incarcerated in state or city prisons for mis¬ 
demeanors, and they will be required by law to “work out” the fine in this man s em¬ 
ploy. The matter may be so manipulated that they will be indefinitely at work to 
reimburse the employer. 
Lynching. This is the most spectacular wrong with which colored Americans 
must contend. It is the illegal killing of colored men and women by mobs of white 
people; but it has become such a habit in America that a few whites are also killed 
every year by white mobs. It is not usually called a “lynching” when a general riot 
takes place, in which white and colored may kill each other, but a person is said to 
be lynched when a mob takes him and illegally executes him; he may have been al- 
read}^ convicted of crime, or he may be accused and not convicted, or he may be not 
even accused of any crime or misdemeanor, but may have in some other way aroused 
the anger or resentment of the mob. Lynching is not done for any special crime and 
often happens for no crime at all. The charge of rape has been over-worked as an 
excuse for lynching colored men, but of the more than 3,000 colored people lynched 
in 35 years, less than 20 percent were even so much as accused of rape, and the charge 
of rape is often found later to be false. Many of these lynching carnivals are among 
the most cruel and horrible barbarities in the history of human relations. 
But fortunately for America and civilization, there are spirits and movements 
and organizations with tendencies to arrest and rectify these wrongs. Much has been 
done through the education of the Negro and the white masses of the south, and 
through social agencies and interracial movements. The free public school did not 
exist in the south until after the Civil War, while to-day there is a system of public 
schools in every southern state, even for the colored populations. Millions of colored 
children are in school and the illiteracy of the race has been reduced from almost 
100 percent sixty years ago to about 25 percent to-day. 
The foundation of the education of southern Negroes was laid immediately after 
the Civil War by missionary societies and teachers of northern and eastern white 
churches. They built hundreds of schools and colleges for colored children and adults 
