The Whipping Scars On The Back of The Fugitive Slave Named Gordon

Runaway Slave Gordon.

From the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, "Photography changes the way we record and respond to social issues," by Frank H. Goodyear, III, assistant curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, suggests how mass produced and widely distributed images helped the abolitionist movement.

During the Civil War, photography heroicized the leading politicians and military officers, memorialized sites where the war was waged, and—remarkable for the time—revealed how violent and deadly the battles between Union and Confederate forces actually were. It also played an influential role in broadening the national debate about slavery. As this famous photograph suggests, photography was capable of communicating powerful ideas about the so-called “peculiar institution”—ideas that ultimately undermined the prevailing notion that slavery was a benign tradition.

Gordon As He Entered Our Lines

The photograph pictures the runaway slave Gordon exposing his scourged back to the camera of two itinerant photographers, William D. McPherson and his partner, Mr. Oliver. Gordon had received a severe whipping for undisclosed reasons in the fall of 1862. This beating left him with horrible welts on much of the surface of his back. While the plantation owner discharged the overseer who had carried out this vicious attack, for the next two months as Gordon recuperated in bed, he decided to escape.

In March 1863 he fled his home, heading east towards the Mississippi River. Upon learning of his flight, his master recruited several neighbors and together they chased after him with a pack of bloodhounds. Gordon had anticipated that he would be pursued and carried with him onions from the plantation, which he rubbed on his body to throw the dogs off-scent. Such resourcefulness worked, and Gordon—his clothes torn and his body covered with mud and dirt—reached the safety of Union soldiers stationed at Baton Rouge ten days later. He had traveled approximately eighty miles.

Runaway Slave Gordon under medical inspection.

While at this encampment Gordon decided to enlist in the Union Army. As President Lincoln had granted African Americans the opportunity to serve in segregated units only months earlier, Gordon was at the front of a movement that would ultimately involve nearly 200,000 African Americans. It was during his medical examination prior to being mustered into the army that military doctors discovered the extensive scars on his back. McPherson and Oliver were then in the camp, and Gordon was asked to pose for a picture that would reveal the harsh treatment he had recently received.

The photographic team mass-produced and sold copies of Gordon’s portrait in the small and popular format of the time, known as the carte-de-visite. The image provoked an immediate response as copies circulated quickly and widely. Samuel K. Towle, a surgeon with the 30th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers working in Baton Rouge, sent a copy of the photograph to the Surgeon-General of the State of Massachusetts. In his accompanying letter he wrote: “Few sensation writers ever depicted worse punishments than this man must have received, though nothing in his appearance indicates any unusual viciousness—but on the contrary, he seems INTELLIGENT AND WELL-BEHAVED.” Within months commercial photographers in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and London were issuing this image on their own studio mounts. This particular copy was made by the famous New York portrait photographer Mathew Brady.

Harper's Weekly, July 4, 1863

Recognized as a searing indictment of slavery, Gordon’s portrait was presented as the latest evidence in the abolitionist campaign. An unidentified writer for the New York Independent wrote: “This Card Photograph should be multiplied by 100,000, and scattered over the States. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe [author of the 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin] can not approach, because it tells the story to the eye.” Abolitionist leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison referred to it repeatedly in their work.

On July 4, 1863 Harper’s Weekly reproduced the image as a wood engraving with the article, “A Typical Negro.” Two other portraits of Gordon—one “as he entered our lines,” and the other “in his uniform as a U.S. soldier”—were also included. Together these three images and the accompanying article about his harrowing journey and the brutality of Southern slaveholders transformed Gordon into a symbol of the courage and patriotism of African Americans. His example also inspired many free blacks in the North to enlist.

Gordon in his uniform as a U.S. Soldier.

Records of Gordon’s military service during the Civil War are incomplete. Harper’s Weekly reported that he served as a Union guide in Louisiana, and that during one expedition he was taken captive by Confederate forces, beaten, and left for dead. Yet, he supposedly survived and returned to Union lines. The Liberator reported that he served as a sergeant in an African American regiment that fought bravely at the siege of Port Hudson, an important Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River twenty miles north of Baton Rouge. This battle on May 27, 1863 marked the first time that African American soldiers played a leading role in an assault on a major Confederate position. Their heroism was widely noted and helped convince many skeptics to accept the enlistment of African Americans into the U.S. Army. There are no further records indicating what became of Gordon. Yet, this famous image of him lives on as a searing testament of slavery’s brutality and the fortitude displayed by so many African Americans during this period. (source: Smithsonian Photography Initiative)

The Mimicking of the Slave System Structure in the Post-Emancipation Prison System

Kim Gilmore's "Slavery and Prison - Understanding the Connections," states: The transfer of power to the state signaled by the 13th Amendment profoundly reshaped the political landscape along with emancipation. By empowering the state to regulate relationships between private individuals, the state also gained the ability to determine the contours of freedom and unfreedom. The expansion of state jurisdiction thus had the dual effect of establishing legal rights for African Americans while paving the way for new, state-maintained structures of racism. Convict labor became increasingly racialized: it was assumed that blacks were more suitable for hard physical labor on Southern prison farms and on corporate railroad and construction company projects (Lichtenstein, 1996b). Contrary to popular representations of chain gang labor, not only black men, but also black women were forced to work on the lines and on hard labor projects, revealing how the slave order was being mirrored in the emerging punishment system. This mimicking of the slave system structure in the post-emancipation prison system, particularly in the South, suggested a belief that the performance of antebellum culture could bring the slave system back to life (Jackson, 1999). In Northern prisons, which had historically been structured around industrial rather than agricultural labor, racially based divisions were sharpened after emancipation as well. African Americans were criminalized for committing Black Code-type crimes and often were subject to tougher sentences than those imposed upon whites convicted of similar crimes (Du Bois, 1935).

Even though the efforts of ex-slaves and other abolitionists made it impossible to reinstall legalized chattel slavery, racialized labor arrangements persisted in the form of convict labor. Convict labor built the post-Civil War infrastructure in the U.S., not just in the South but also throughout the U.S., and the struggle to determine how free unfree labor would be continued. Labor unions, which had always been skeptical about prison labor, aggressively lobbied against the leasing of convicts to private corporations. Throughout the Depression years, unionists made it clear that an expanded use of prison labor would further imperil an already overfull work force and intervene in "free markets" in ways that threatened the stability of capitalism and laid bare its most excessive failures. Slowly, prisons and jails solved this problem by developing a "state-use" system in which prison labor was used solely for state projects. This solution eliminated the competition between convict labor and union labor, while still enabling convicts to offset their cost to the state (McGinn, 1993). The Prison Industries Reorganization Administration (PIRA), a New Deal project, conducted a massive study of prison labor in all 50 states and concluded by outlining this new state-use system. Citing overcrowding and inadequate facilities, the PIRA recommended the expansion of the prison system and the construction of new prisons in almost every state (Fraser and Gerstle, 1989). No clear statistics demonstrate that "crime," particularly violent crime, had increased during this period. Moreover, many of those who ended up in prison were criminalized for crimes stemming from unemployment, suggesting that if the state had had a handle on unemployment, there may not have been a need for more prisons. Thus, the PIRA embodied one of the many contradictions embedded in the "New Deal state" -- its inability (or unwillingness) to deal with its overabundance of labor. Thus, the PIRA, together with a racialized labor system that had roots in the slave system, cleared the path for the prison-industrial complex that has flourished in the post-World War II period.

Convicts picking cotton.

Given the links between the legacy of slavery and mass imprisonment of people of color in the U.S., it might be useful to examine how a few previous prison abolition movements positioned themselves in relation to this history. These groups were often led by Quakers or inspired by the Quaker abolitionists of the 19th century. One such group, the Committee to Abolish Prison Slavery (CAPS), was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s and saw the abolition of mass imprisonment as the key to completing the partial emancipation signaled by the 13th Amendment. According to CAPS, which produced Prison Slavery, their collaboratively authored book, the triumph of emancipation was not a total victory since the 13th Amendment legalized penal servitude as punishment for particular crimes, a stipulation that was incorporated into many state constitutions. Prison Slavery (Esposito and Wood, 1982:114) cites the significant 1871 court ruling from Ruffin v. Commonwealth. This landmark Virginia case--revealingly argued using the language of slavery -- set a precedent for state control of inmate bodies and labor:

United States Prisoners Picking Cotton

[1] For the time, during his term of service in the penitentiary, he is in a state of penal servitude to the State. He has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being a slave of the State. He is civiliter mortus; and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man.

CAPS found much to admire in the 19th-century slave abolition movement, but viewed penal servitude as a new incarnation of slavery. The group critiqued the failure of abolitionists, particularly Quakers, who worked to overthrow the Southern slave regime but stopped short of eliminating the broader inequalities that were reflected in the prison system. CAPS was, essentially, struggling to define the continuing nature of unfree labor and was critical of the Quakers who preceded them for participating in class oppression.

Prison labor.

When Prison Slavery was published in 1982, many states still had clauses in their constitutions that deemed slavery and indentured servitude legal punishments or had no proviso about the legality or illegality of prison enslavement (some states eliminated any reference to slavery in the middle decades of this century). Since this 13th Amendment provision was, for CAPS, the legal cornerstone codifying prison slavery, they proposed a "new abolitionism" that would make the elimination of these clauses from all constitutions its goal. Their abolitionist strategies also included education campaigns to inform the public about prison conditions, an issue typically relegated to the sidelines of an individual's physical and psychic landscapes. The group also advocated boycotting consumer products made by prison labor, supporting alternatives to imprisonment, and working toward an acknowledgement of the class-based exploitation inherent in mass imprisonment. By circulating petitions that would amend state punishment clauses, CAPS created alliances between prisoners on the inside and activists on the outside. They learned of the brutalities that often occurred behind prison walls through testimonies from inmates who had developed their own analyses of prison system injustices, but frequently found themselves confined by the limited resources available to them, or constrained by criminal justice administrators and guards who threatened prisoners with violence for expressing their views and working for change. (source: History as a Weapon)

Torture Device: Pillory and Stocks

STOCKS

The convict hangs by wrists and ankles two inches from the ground. He is left thus under the tropic sun. The position is excruciating torture which quickly produces unconsciousness.

Stocks and pillories were regularly used to punish minor offences committed by slaves. Although whipping was also a common punishment, some owners were sparing with this for fear of damaging or killing valuable slaves. Here is a personal testimony made to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839:

"A planter, a professor of religion, in conversation upon the universality of whipping, remarked that a planter in G--, who had whipped a great deal, at length got tired of it, and invented the following excellent method of punishment, which I saw practised while I was paying him a visit. The negro was placed in a sitting position, with his hands made fast above his head, and feet in the stocks, so that he could not move any part of the body. The master retired, intending to leave him till morning, but we were awakened in the night by the groans of the negro, which were so doleful that we feared he was dying. We went to him, and found him covered with a cold sweat, and almost gone. He could not has lived an hour longer. Mr.--found the 'stocks' such an effective punishment, that it almost superseded the whip.” (source: Geocities)

Pillory and Stocks

The pillory was a wooden frame on a pole with holes through which a person's head and hands were placed. The frame was then locked and the person was subjected to humiliation and ridicule. Sometimes people also threw unpleasant objects at the person in the pillory. The stocks was a wooden frame with holes through which a person's feet were placed and they were humiliated in the same way. Use of the pillory and stocks went out of favour in the 19th century. The pillory was abolished in Britain in 1837 and the stocks was abolished in 1870 (source: Geocities)

Another personal testimony made to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 concerning the fate of a slave who attempted to escape:

"On the return of his master, some of the slaves were sent for Harry. When he came home he was seized and confined in the stocks. The stocks were built in the barn, and consisted of two heavy pieces of timber, ten or more feet in length, and about seven inches wide; the lower one, on the floor, has a number of holes or places cut in it, for the ankles; the upper piece, being of the same dimensions, is fastened at one end by a hinge, and is brought down after the ankles are placed in the holes, and secured by a clasp and padlock at the other end. In this manner the person is left to sit on the floor. Harry was kept in the stocks day and night for a week, and flogged every morning. After this, he was taken out one morning, a log chain fastened around his neck, the two ends dragging on the ground, and he sent to the field, to do his task with the other slaves. At night he was again put in the stocks, in the morning he was sent to the field in the same manner, and thus dragged out another week."

Stocks and pillories were on occasions used with particular savagery, as the following illustrates:

“In the House of Commons on 1 July 1830, during the course of a speech on slavery in the colonies, an instance was mentioned of cruel treatment meted out by an English gentlewoman to a slave girl. On suspicion of being concerned in a theft, the young negress was imprisoned in the stocks for seventeen days, during which period she was deprived of sleep by rubbing red pepper into her eyes, and she was flogged repeatedly.” (“A History of Torture” by George Riley Scott)

Field stocks were much used as a means of punishing female offenders, when regulations substituting this form of punishment in place of female flogging came into force. These consisted of stocks for the victim’s hands which could be adjusted to any height above her head, while her feet were placed in horizontal stocks. The hand stocks could be raised and secured until only the victim’s toes could touch the ground. The whole weight of her body rested upon her wrists and toes. In Trinidad, to increase the punishment, leaden or iron weights were tied to the wrists.

Slave Tortures: The Mask, Scold's Bridle, or Brank

Mulier taceat in ecclesia

- 'Let the woman be silent in church'

Let the Woman be Silent in Church: Over four centuries, thousands of women were subjected to the wearing of these contraptions. The main principle behind the scold's bridle was: let the woman be silent in church, though the word 'church' referred to the Parish community, or to be more precise; the male hierarchies of a community, rather than the building of bricks and mortar. Further translation would suggest more accurately - 'Let the woman be silent in the presence of the male'.

English or possibly Colonial American as these were used by the Puritan Pilgrims who severely punished offenses which violated their cultural or religious values. The concept and its predecessors originated in Scotland and were popular throughout England. Comprising a finely forged cage of four bars, sized for a woman’s head, the front shaped to accommodate the nose. The lower face enclosed by a plate with pin pierced ventilation holes and a small triangular opening at the mouth through which food and drink could be administered.

The back bar with a finely forged “pig tail” terminal. The sides with shackles meeting the back side bars with small holes for rivet fastening. This example is distinguished by its small feeding aperture and provision for rivet locking rather than padlocking. The former feature undoubtedly allowed for bread and water to sustain life and both features indicate its use for long term incarceration. Its fine rich stable patina is as found on examples preserved in museum collections. Height: 11 3/4” (source: Faganarms)

Scold's Bridle: This was a metal frame place over a woman's head. It had a bit that stuck in her mouth to prevent her talking. The scold's bridle or branks was used in Scotland by the 16th century and was used in England from the 17th century. It was last used in Britain in 1824

Source: Le Magasin Pittoresque (1846, Vol. 14), p. 229

Comments
Caption "Esclave Marron a Rio de Janeiro" (Fugitive/Runaway Slave in Rio de Janeiro), based on a drawing by a Mister Bellel. The engraving illustrates a brief article on fugitive slaves in Brazil, and is apparently derived from first-hand information. "Captured fugitives," the article notes, "are forced to do the hardest and roughest work. They are ordinarily placed in chains and are led in groups through the city's neighborhoods where they carry loads or sweep refuse in the streets. This type of slave is so frightful that, while they have lost all hope of fleeing again, they think of nothing but suicide. They poison themselves by drinking at one swallow a large quantity of strong liquor, or choke/suffocate themselves by eating dirt/earth. In order to deprive them of this way of causing their own deaths, they put a tin mask on their faces; the mask has only a very narrow slit in front of the mouth and a few little holes under the nose so they can breathe" (p. 229; our translation).

Slave Mask: Image Reference, NW0191. Source:Jacques Arago, Souvenirs d'un aveugle. Voyage autour du monde par M. J. Arago . . . (Paris, 1839-40), vol. 1, facing p. 119

Comments
Arago"s voyage took place between 1817 and 1820, during which time close to two months (early December to the end of January 1818) were spent in Brazil, particularly Rio de Janeiro. The engraving shown here, based on a sketch by Arago, is captioned "Chatiment des Esclaves, Brasil" (Punishment of Slaves). It shows an unidentified male and probably represents a composite of several enslaved Brazilians who Arago observed in the streets of Rio. This illustration is often confused and misidentified in secondary sources on slavery. Among other errors, such sources identify the subject as a woman, but Arago quite explicitly refers to the figure as a man. For a detailed discussion of this image and its historical context, see J. Handler and A. Steiner, "Identifying Pictorial Images of Atlantic Slavery: Three Case Studies," Slavery and Abolition 27 (2006), 56-62. The transformation of this image in Brazil in modern times to represent a martyred female slave is discussed in J. Handler and K. Hayes, "Escrava Anastacia: The Iconographic History of a Brazilian Popular Saint," African Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Africa in a Global World 2 (2009), 1-27

Image Reference BRIDG-4_IMG. Source: Richard Bridgens, West India Scenery...from sketches taken during a voyage to, and residence of seven years in ... Trinidad (London, 1836), plate 20. (Copy in Providence Atheneum, Rhode Island)

Comments: Caption, "Negro Heads, with punishments for Intoxication and dirt-eating." "The tin collar is a punishment for drunkenness in females," while the mask is "a punishment and preventative of . . . dirt eating." The illustration also shows facial and body scarification, or so-called "country marks," indicative of African origin; the man in the center right also displays filed or modified teeth, another indicator of African birth among West Indian slaves (see Jerome Handler, Determining African Birth from Skeletal Remains: A Note on Tooth Mutilation, Historical Archaeology [1994], vol. 28, pp. 113-119). There is no certain date of publication of Bridgens West India Scenery, though major libraries with copies of this work usually assign 1836 as a publication date. A sculptor, designer and architect, Bridgens was born in England in 1785. In 1825 he moved to Trinidad where his wife had inherited a sugar plantation. Although Bridgens apparently occasionally returned to England, he died in Port of Spain in 1846 (Brian Austen, Richard Hicks Bridgens [Oxford Art Online/Grove Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/art/T011315]; thanks to Sarah Thomas for her help). Bridgens’ racist perspectives on enslaved Africans and his defense of slavery are discussed in T. Barringer, G. Forrester, and B. Martinez-Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds [ Yale University Press, 2007], pp. 460-461.

Slave Mask Image Reference, NW0192. Source: Thomas Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant; or, slave trader reformed (New York, 1807), p. 271. (Copy in Library Company of Philadelphia; also Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-31864)

Comments: Bound into this abolitionist work, but consecutively paginated with the title poem, is a separate essay, "The Method of Procuring Slaves on the Coast of Africa; with an account of their sufferings on the voyage, and cruel treatment in the West Indies" (pp. 252-274). This essay is accompanied by a number of engravings, including the one show here, which is described (on p. 270) as follows: "A front and profile view of an African's head, with the mouth-piece and necklace, the hooks round which are placed to prevent an escapee when pursued in the woods, and to hinder them from laying down the head to procure rest. At A [see letter over mouth of figure on the right] is a flat iron which goes into the mouth, and so effectually keeps down the tongue, that nothing can be swallowed, not even the saliva, a passage for which is made through holes in the mouth-plate." On the lower right is an enlarged view of this mouth piece which "when long worn, becomes so heated as frequently to bring off the skin along with it." The lower left shows leg shackles used on the slave ships; also, "spurs used on some plantations in Antigua" (placed on the legs to prevent slaves from absconding). Another illustration in the Penitential Tyrant, which does not appear to be present in all copies of this work (and is not shown on this website) shows a slave lashed to an upright ladder, which is leaning against a tree, while being whipped by another slave as the slavemaster looks on.

The Scold's Bridle

A scold's bridle is a British invention, possibly originating in Scotland, used between the 16th and 19th Century. It was a device used to control, humiliate and punish gossiping, troublesome women by effectively gagging them. Scold comes from the 'common scold': a public nuisance, more often than not women, who habitually gossiped and quarrelled with their neighbours, while the name bridle describes a part that fitted into the mouth. The scold's bridle was also known as the 'gossiping bridle' and the 'Brank(s)', and was commonly used by husbands on their nagging or swearing wives. The device was occasionally used on men; however, it was primarily used on women who agitated the male-dominated society of the era.

The Scold's Bridle

Description:

Made by blacksmiths, the bridle was a cage-like device, made from iron. It was approximately nine inches high and seven inches wide, and was fitted to the woman's head. The most basic type was made of a band of iron, which was hinged at the side and had a protruding part, or tongue piece, that could be flat or with a spike, which went into the woman's mouth, to hold her tongue down. Another band of iron went over her head, the front of which was shaped for her nose to go through. Depending on the design, the bridle could be uncomfortable, painful or torturous, and scarring of the tongue was not uncommon. Some had a bell secured to a spring, which was attached to the bridle, so the wearer could be heard as she approached.

The Scold's Bridle or Branks

Judicial:

Some houses had a hook in the wall at the side of the fireplace where the wife would be chained, until she promised to behave herself and curb her tongue. Although sometimes fitted to a nagging wife by the local gaoler (jailer) at the request of her husband, or by the husband himself, it was more often a punitive sentence ordered by a magistrate. Judicial bridles were more elaborate than the basic type; they always had at least one spike and they could be locked. They also had a chain attached to the side of the bridle, with a ring on the end. This could be used to publicly humiliate the woman by leading her through the town, or staking her at a designated area for a set time period. The amount of time the bridle was worn could be from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on the seriousness of the offence, during which time the miscreant would not be able to eat or drink. It was also said to be used on witches to prevent them from chanting or casting spells.

A water color by Jean Baptiste Debret (held by a museum in Rio de Janeiro); published in Ana Maria de Moraes, O Brasil dos viajantes (Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1994), image 469, p. 93. Also published in Jean Baptiste Debret, Viagem Pitoresca e Historica ao Brasil (Editora Itatiaia Limitada, Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1989), p.128, a reprint of the 1954 Paris edition, edited by R. De Castro Maya).

Comments

Shows a slave wearing a tin mask over his face; he is "heading" a large ceramic jar. Brazilian slavemasters compelled slaves who were prone to eat earth or dirt to wear such masks. This illustration does not appear to have been published in Debret's, Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Bresil (Paris,1834-39), although another slave, wearing such a mask, is illustrated in vol. 2, plate 10, captioned "une visite a la campagne" (the image is not shown on this website). For a description of this mask in Brazil, see image reference ewbank3. The engravings in this book were taken from drawings made by Debret during his residence in Brazil from 1816 to 1831. For watercolors by Debret of scenes in Brazil, some of which were incorporated into his Voyage Pittoresque, see Jean Baptiste Debret, Viagem Pitoresca e Historica ao Brasil (Editora Itatiaia Limitada, Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1989; a reprint of the 1954 Paris edition, edited by R. De Castro Maya).

Brank ( aka the Scold's Bridle) The Medieval period of the Middle Ages was violent, and blood thirsty. In these barbarous times the cruel and pitiless torturers were induced to inflict the horrors of tortures, including the Brank, on prisoners by restrictive. Torture methods, devices and instruments were used to inflict the deliberate, systematic, cruel and wanton infliction of physical and mental suffering. There were no laws or rules to protect the treatment of prisoners who faced torture, such as the Brank ( aka the Scold's Bridle) by restrictive. Torture was seen as a totally legitimate means for justice to extract confessions, obtain the names of accomplices, obtain testimonies or confessions.

Crimes which warranted the use of / Method of inflicting the Brank

Different types of torture were used depending on the victim's crime and social status. There were also different tortures used for men and women. The Brank was also known as the Scold's Bridle and it was specifically used as a torture for women to inflict humiliation and discomfort as opposed to pain. A scold was a term given to a gossip, shrew or bad tempered woman during the Middle Ages. A scold was defined as: "A troublesome and angry woman who by brawling and wrangling amongst her neighbours breaks the public peace, increases discord and becomes a public nuisance to the neighbourhood." The device was a locking iron muzzle, metal mask or cage which encased the head. There was an iron curb projecting into the mouth which rested on the top of the tongue. This device prevented the shrew from speaking. In some instances the iron curb was studded with spikes which inflicted pain if the victim spoke. Some branks had a bell built in which drew attention to the scold as she walked through the streets. The woman would be humiliated by the jeering and comments from other people.

Enslavement After Emancipation

On the local level, most southern towns and municipalities passed strict vagrancy laws to control the influx of black migrants and homeless people who poured into these urban communities in the years after the Civil War. In Mississippi, for example, whites passed the notorious "Pig Law" of 1876, designed to control vagrant blacks at loose in the community. This law made stealing a pig an act of grand larceny subject to punishment of up to five years in prison. Within two years, the number of convicts in the state penitentiary increased from under three hundred people to over one thousand.

It was this law in Mississippi that turned the convict lease system into a profitable business, whereby convicts were leased to contractors who sub-leased them to planters, railroads, levee contractors, and timber jobbers.

Almost all of the convicts in this situation were blacks, including women, and the conditions in the camps were horrible in the extreme. It was not uncommon to have a death rate of blacks in the camps at between 8 to 18 percent. In a rare piece of journalism, the Jackson Weekly Clarion, printed in 1887 the inspection report of the state prison in Mississippi:

"We found [in the hospital section] twenty-six inmates, all of whom have been lately brought there off the farms and railroads, many of them with consumption and other incurable diseases, and all bearing on their persons marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment. Most of them have their backs cut in great wales, scars and blisters, some with the skin pealing off in pieces as the result of severe beatings.

Their feet and hands in some instances show signs of frostbite, and all of them with the stamp of manhood almost blotted out of their faces.... They are lying there dying, some of them on bare boards, so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through their skin, many complaining for the want of food.... We actually saw live vermin crawling over their faces, and the little bedding and clothing they have is in tatters and stiff with filth.

As a fair sample of this system, on January 6, 1887, 204 convicts were leased to McDonald up to June 6, 1887, and during this six months 20 died, and 19 were discharged and escaped and 23 were returned to the walls disabled and sick, many of whom have since died."

(Creating Jim Crow: In-Depth Essay, by Ronald L. F. Davis, Ph. D.)

Thumbscrew Torture Device

Thumbscrew

Now, people know what this contraption is? These are thumb screws. Thumbscrews are basically an instrument of torture.

They would be used on a slave ship in the aftermath, especially of an uprising, and insurrection in which the ring leaders would have their thumbs placed under the metal loops, the key turned producing a kind of pain that is almost indescribable from what I can learn of it.

Leaving a man in that condition for hours if not days and after which the thumb might have to be amputated. In his parliamentary testimony, John Newton said, “I have known slave ship captains to use thumbscrews that produce the most excruciating pain among the enslaved”.

I dare say he did know it because he himself had used them as he describes in his journal, and moreover folks, he used them on children on one occasion because he thought they had passed tools to the men through the gratings which they then used to get out of their irons and to try to rise up and capture the ship. (Talk given by Marcus Rediker in November 2007 at Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool Museum)

The thumbscrews or pilliwinks is a torture instrument which was first used in medieval Europe. It is a simple vice, sometimes with protruding studs on the interior surfaces. The victim's thumbs or fingers were placed in the vice and slowly crushed. The thumbscrew was also applied to crush prisoners' big toes. The crushing bars were sometimes lined with sharp metal points to puncture the nails and inflict greater pain in the nail beds. Larger, heavier devices based on the same design principle were applied to crush knees and elbows.

EMMETT TILL: MORE THAN A MURDER

The Clarion-Ledger/ Jackson Daily News on August 25, 1985 article, "Emmett Till: More Than A Murder: Bryant wants the past to ‘stay dead’," by Joe Atkins a Jackson Daily News Staff Writer and Tom Brennan a Clarion-Ledger Staff Writer"

Roy Bryant seems to be two men.

On one hand, the 54-year-old white Delta storeowner is sick of questions about the 14-year-old black youth he and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, were accused and acquitted of killing 30 years ago.

This Roy Bryant’s voice becomes a growl at the mention of Emmett Till. “He’s been dead 30 years and I can’t see why it can’t stay dead,” he says.

The other Roy Bryant is an agreeable sort whose face brightens with pride when he talks about the flowers he has grown in front of his store. He says he gets along fine with blacks.

“I don’t mistreat a man because he’s black any more than I do a white man,” he says. “I treat a man like I want to be treated.”

The second side of Roy Bryant wants his privacy and worries that some young black might seek belated vengeance. He possesses such loyalty from friends that one of them nearly slugged a television reporter who recently tried to interview him.

“I don’t know what happened to Emmett Till,” this Roy Bryant says.

Yet, the other Roy Bryant grumbles darkly that he isn’t making a dime out of renewed publicity about Emmett Till’s slaying. He says his memory could be jogged “for a bunch of money.”

This Roy Bryant even thinks enough of his notoriety to keep in his modest brick home a video cassette of the Today show’s recent televised report on the Till case, a show in which host Bryant Gumbel innocently asks, “Whatever happened to Roy Bryant?”

“Hell no, I didn’t do it!” Bryant said during one of two recent interviews at his store and home. “I didn’t admit to it then. You don’t expect me to admit to do it now. Of course they couldn’t do anything to me if I did.”

But, he adds, “I feel this way: If Emmett Till hadn’t got out of line, it probably wouldn’t have happened to him.”

The man who, with Milam, gained international attention in the Emmett Till slaying today lives an obscure life not unlike that of 30 years ago.

Map of Money, Mississippi

He lives in a Mississippi Delta town. He runs a store. He vigorously maintains his innocence in Till’s death.

Bryant mostly refuses to discuss the events of that Sunday morning in August 1955, when Till was dragged from his great-uncle’s home. He and Milam told authorities at the time they’d taken the youth off to punish him but later released him unharmed.

Bryant was described by news reports in 1955 as the handsome ex-paratrooper with the beautiful wife. Now, the good looks and the woman, both, are gone.

Bryant has gained a thick paunch, lost much of his jet black hair and says he is legally blind. He uses a thick magnifying glass to read price tags when he rings up purchases at his store.

He has been divorced for six years from Carolyn Holloway Bryant, the dark-eyed brunette beauty whose honor Bryant and Milam are said to have defended 30 years ago. Bryant says both have remarried, but their three children and eight grandchildren keep them in touch.

“She was a good-looking woman,” he said as he watched an old film of her on the Today report.

Despite the support shown them by white Delta residents during their trial, Bryant and Milam were ostracized afterward by both the white and black communities.

Their isolation worsened after January 1956, when a shattering article by author William Bradford Huie appeared in Look magazine. The article quoted Milam, who described in detail how he and Bryant brutally beat the boy and finally dumped him in the river after Milam shot him.

“J. W. Milam was from Glendora. He was acquitted in the trial, but he was not acquitted by the people of this area,” recalls unsuccessful 1983 gubernatorial candidate Mike Sturdivant, a large landowner in the tiny Tallahatchie County town of Glendora. Sturdivant knew Milam and Bryant.

“J. W. left Glendora because the people in the area convicted him in their relationship with him.”

Bryant bitterly maintains he was driven from the state by the same community that rallied to his and his half-brother’s defense during the September 1955 trial.

“I had to leave to make a living; there was nothing here for me,” he said.

After the trial, he and his first wife tried to reopen the store in Money, the scene of the infamous wolf-whistle, but a boycott by black customers forced its closing.

“We had it open for three weeks and didn’t clear $100,” he said. “I saw the handwriting on the wall.”

Bryant says he did odd jobs for 75 cents a day before learning welding at the Bell Machine Shop in Inverness. The family moved to Orange, Texas, in 1957, where he spent 15 years as a boilermaker – the job he says cost him his eyesight. In 1972, the Bryants returned to Mississippi to take over a grocery owned by one of Bryant’s brothers.

Roy Bryant's Store in Money, Mississippi

“Mississippi was my home. Once you are raised up in a state, it’s home,” he says.

I wouldn’t have come back to Mississippi for a job.”

For 13 years , Bryant has been satisfied with his hew life. His sister helps him out at the store.

“It may not be much, but it’s a honest living and that’s all a man can ask,” he says.

His domain how is a converted gas station with a wooden floor. The store is cluttered with the mainstays of small-town living: canned goods, snacks, cigarettes and one beer cooler.

As in 1955, Bryant today relies on credit purchases and a black clientele. “I have a good black business, more black customers than whites.”

Chain smoking behind the counter while a spotted cat sleeps nearby on a pile of grocery sacks, Bryant talks not of the past, but of what he has done with the store.

He points with a dedicated gardener’s pride to the rose moss flowers growing by a shoeshine stand outside the store. He welcomes visitors to the café he built in the back, with its three red-vinyl booths, pool table and three-stool bar.

“It is a family type of place,” he said. “We serve plate lunches and sandwiches and that type of stuff (publicity about the Till slaying) just wouldn’t help.”

He speaks fondly of Milam, his half-brother, who was 36 at the time of the Till trial. Milam died of cancer of the backbone on Dec. 31, 1981.

“He was a hell of a fine fellow and brother. He was gentle as a lamb and helped a lot of people that never paid him back.”

Like Bryant, Milam spent many years in Texas after the trial. Like Bryant, he eventually returned to his home state. He lived in Greenville and worked in construction until his illness made it impossible.

“My father never said much to me about it and I never asked,” says Milam’s son, Bill, a 34 year-old Greenville truck driver who attended his father’s trial along with his brother, Harvey, who was 2 years old at the time.

“I don’t have any memories of it at all,” Bill Milam says of the trial in Sumner. “I was so little, didn’t none of it affect me. I never wanted to get involved in it. Most folks I know had never said anything about it.”

Bill Milam is single. Harvey is married and has three children, but Bill wouldn’t say where his brother lives.

Bryant’s son, Frank, shields his mother from publicity. “She doesn’t want to make any comment on anything and she doesn’t want anyone to try to contact her,” he said.

Bryant still fears economic and physical retaliation for the 30-year-old incident and refuses to have his picture taken or to have the location of his store revealed.

“This new generation is different and I don’t want to worry about a bullet some dark night,” he said. “This store is all I have now, that and my disability check.”

Does he have any personal regrets about what happened in 1955?

“You mean do I wish I might wouldn’t have done it? I’m just sorry that it happened,” Bryant said.

The.Untold.Story.Of.Emmett.Louis.Till.1of2


The.Untold.Story.Of.Emmett.Louis.Till.2of2