eir social and political relations.

This period has been marked also by an effort to establish in the South a
system of peonage not unlike that of Mexico, a sort of involuntary
servitude in that one is considered legally bound to serve his master
until a debt contracted is paid. Such laws have been enacted in Florida,
Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. No such
distinction in law has been able to stand the constitutional test of the
United States courts as was evidenced by the decision of the Supreme Court
in 1911 declaring the Alabama law unconstitutional.[13] But the planters
of the South, still a law unto themselves, have maintained actual slavery
in sequestered; districts where public opinion against peonage is too weak
to support federal authorities in exterminating it.[14] The Negroes
themselves dare not protest under penalty of persecution and the peon
concerned usually accepts his lot like that of a slave. Some years ago it
was commonly reported that in trying to escape, the persons undertaking it
often fail and suffer death at the hands of the planter or of murderous
mobs, giving as their excuse, if any be required, that the Negro is a
desperado or some other sort of criminal.

Unfortunately this reaction extended also to education. Appropriations to
public schools for Negroes diminished from year to year and when there
appeared practical leaders with, their sane plan for industrial education
the South ignorantly accepted this scheme as a desirable subterfuge for
seeming to support Negro education and at the same time directing the
development of the blacks in such a way that they would never become the
competitors of the white people. This was not these educators' idea but
the South so understood it and in effecting the readjustment, practically
left the Negroes out of the pale of the public school systems.
Consequently, there has been added to the Negroes' misfortunes, in the
South, that of being unable to obtain liberal education at public expense,
although they themselves, as the largest consumers in some parts, pay most
of the taxes appropriated to the support of schools for the youth of the
other race.[15]

The South, moreover, has adopted the policy of a more general intimidation
of the Negroes to keep them down. The lynching of the blacks, at first for
assaults on white women and later for almost any offense, has rapidly
developed as an institution. Within the past fifty