the colored laborer by the United States Supreme Court, as a fair example of what Southern law and administration are doing to reduce the Negro to a condition of helpless industrial slavery:

I want to ask your attention in passing to a few points about this case. First the Negro laborer is convicted on a charge of larceny. This charge might have been trumped up by some white person who wanted the Negro’s service. I do not know. I would not take the word of a Southern Court on this point. At any rate the Negro laborer is convicted and a fine is imposed upon him, which he is unable to pay. Now comes the opportunity of the white employer, who happens to be conveniently in Court, to come to the rescue of the poor Negro. He pays the fine and the Negro contracts to pay him back by giving him nine months of his labor. The Negro thereupon enters upon the performance of this contract, but fails for some reason, not stated, to finish it. How long he worked does not appear either, but this much does. He is haled into Court a second time and a second time a fine is imposed upon him. And again an employer, who is opportunely present at the second trial, pays the fine. The Negro now binds himself to the service of this second man for fourteen months, which, to use a slang expression, is surely “going some.” At this stage of the game, however, the United States Government stepped into the case, otherwise a third charge might have been preferred in due time, and again the term of involuntary service lengthened, and so on ad infinitum until death released the victim. This is a well-known Southern method for multiplying Negro criminals to meet the demands of Southern employers of cheap labor. It is a danger to which every colored man is exposed in the South, because Southern Courts are as a rule administered in the interest of the employer class wherever the Negro is concerned. There have been a few notable instances of Southern Judges who have refused to lend their Courts to this iniquitous business, like Judge Emory Speer, of Georgia, and the late Judge Jones, of Alabama, but such examples are like angels’ visits—few and far between in that land of race repression and oppression.

Take another and different case, which is common enough in the South also. It is, like the preceding clipping, taken from the Washington Post: