"Except as a Punishment"
A Colloquium and
Teaching Workshop
Exploring Unfree Labor in the U.S. South, 1865 to Present
January 19-21, 2023
Join us on January 19-21 (Thursday-Saturday), 2023 as the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race and Reconciliation and the Center for Southern Studies at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee host a three-part colloquium of scholars, writers, musicians, and activists whose work engages the significance of unfree labor in the development of the U.S. South after emancipation.
We will bring together insights from many disciplines and professional fields to illuminate both the history of post-slavery unfree labor and the ways this history lives on in the present: how carceral and labor systems improvised after the Civil War have survived, both in the physical and economic infrastructure we inhabit and the practices we continue to tolerate.
The idea for this conference arises from a fortuitous convergence: the University of the South’s campus is located just 12 miles from Tracy City, Tennessee, the epicenter of 19th-century convict leasing in the state and the site of recent archaeological work at the Lone Rock Stockade. Meanwhile the Roberson Project was awarded a grant to serve as a hub institution in the “Legacies of American Slavery” project cosponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges and Yale’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition directed by historian David W. Blight. Unfree labor in its multitude of forms is a legacy of slavery. For instance, without the convict-labor-built Dixie Highway that ran right through our campus and the railroad that made our remote mountaintop accessible to students (and would not have existed without the nearby coal and iron works staffed by prisoners), it’s doubtful Sewanee would even be here now. The significance of unfree labor within the history of incarceration and its integral role in the development of the post-Civil War “New South” make it a subject worthy of close study.
Keynote Speaker: Earl Lewis
"Our Violent Past: Unfree Labor, Terrorism, and the Search for Repair"
In recent years, public media and politicians have renewed the focus on the search for reparations for African American descendants of enslavement. Whether we are exploring slavery, postemancipation, Jim Crow or mass incarceration, it is impossible to ignore the through-line of violence or racial terrorism. Without the benefits of land, tools, cash or other commercial resources, the only thing free men and women had to trade after the Civil War was their labor. This meant they expected treatment as market equals, with the right to negotiate their wages, regulate the contributions of household labor, and share in the profits their labor produced. Almost as immediately, agents of White hegemony asserted a different understanding, one that maintained the subordination of Black workers and underscored the supremacy of Whites in negotiating the limits of freedom. This talk focuses on the role White violence or terror played in shaping the contours of freedom and explains why its appearance injured any hopes of racial repair, even as it shaped the ways African Americans wrote themselves into history.
Earl Lewis (University of Michigan) is a noted social historian, award-winning author, educational leader, and founding director of the University of Michigan Center for Social Solutions and the Thomas C. Holt distinguished University Professor of History, Afroamerican and African Studies, and public policy.