Bound Labor in the Turpentine Belt: Kinderlou Camp and Misdemeanor Convict Leasing in Georgia
Thomas Aiello
University Press of Florida
After the constitutional end to slavery in the United States, southern white landowners replaced labor by enslaved people with systems of bound labor in which people worked to pay off debts or legal fines. Through the story of a labor camp in Georgia, Aiello takes a close look at the Deep South’s dependence on debt peonage and convict leasing systems during the post-Reconstruction era and draws attention to a form of bound labor that has not been discussed by scholars of racialized incarceration.