"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The ratification of Thirteenth Amendment at the end of the Civil War, not only abolished slavery but instituted a revolution of equality and democracy. The Amendment was the first of three, resulting in a politically motivated and engaged black citizenry. Participating in every level of democracy, freedmen elected black representatives, expanded literacy through the first public school systems, and built supportive social institutions and policies.

These challenges to white supremacy were met with violent and political responses, and as W.E.B. Du Bois concisely wrote, “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” Through the use of the Black Codes — a series of laws that all but removed freedom and equality from black life — together with debt and the exception written into the Thirteenth Amendment, the South built a new social order that rivaled antebellum slavery and the cotton economy: the convict leasing system. The Black Codes used petty or fabricated offenses, such as vagrancy — the “crime” of being unemployed — to keep freed people in forced labor, or as the author Douglas Blackmon termed it, Slavery By Another Name.

For more than seven decades after the Civil War, black convicts were forced into involuntary servitude and slavery at the hands of the states and private companies. With the rise of industrialization and the production of iron and coal in Alabama, tens of thousands of black men, and some women and children, were sold into the mines. Convicts were seen as disposable property, dying in the thousands from disease, injury, and torture. Pushed beyond their limits in horrid conditions, the industrial new South was built on the backs of black bodies through violence and exploitation. Revenue, development, and production surged as Blackmon details, “[By] 1905, the state’s mines, anchored by the slave camps near Birmingham, generated nearly twelve million tons of coal and almost four million tons of iron ore — making Alabama one of the foremost producers of iron, steel, and coal in the world.”

Swing Low begins with the pickaxe, the instrument of profit and torture in the mines. Cast in bituminous coal and wax, the pickaxes become black bodies and the labor behind the grand courthouses and their drawings. Southern courthouses were the epicenter of the neo-slavery system and lynchings, and before that, the site of slave markets and auctions. The drawings of Alabama courthouses depict the judicial infrastructure that was built from expanded revenue and treasuries, which benefited from and maintained slavery well into the 20th century. And as Blackmon concludes, “As painful as it may be to plow the past, among the ephemera left behind by generations crushed in the wheels of American white supremacy are telling explanations for the fissures that still thread our society. In fact, these events explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.”

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The ratification of Thirteenth Amendment at the end of the Civil War, not only abolished slavery but instituted a revolution of equality and democracy. The Amendment was the first of three, resulting in a politically motivated and engaged black citizenry. Participating in every level of democracy, freedmen elected black representatives, expanded literacy through the first public school systems, and built supportive social institutions and policies.

These challenges to white supremacy were met with violent and political responses, and as W.E.B. Du Bois concisely wrote, “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” Through the use of the Black Codes — a series of laws that all but removed freedom and equality from black life — together with debt and the exception written into the Thirteenth Amendment, the South built a new social order that rivaled antebellum slavery and the cotton economy: the convict leasing system. The Black Codes used petty or fabricated offenses, such as vagrancy — the “crime” of being unemployed — to keep freed people in forced labor, or as the author Douglas Blackmon termed it, Slavery By Another Name.

For more than seven decades after the Civil War, black convicts were forced into involuntary servitude and slavery at the hands of the states and private companies. With the rise of industrialization and the production of iron and coal in Alabama, tens of thousands of black men, and some women and children, were sold into the mines. Convicts were seen as disposable property, dying in the thousands from disease, injury, and torture. Pushed beyond their limits in horrid conditions, the industrial new South was built on the backs of black bodies through violence and exploitation. Revenue, development, and production surged as Blackmon details, “[By] 1905, the state’s mines, anchored by the slave camps near Birmingham, generated nearly twelve million tons of coal and almost four million tons of iron ore — making Alabama one of the foremost producers of iron, steel, and coal in the world.”

Swing Low begins with the pickaxe, the instrument of profit and torture in the mines. Cast in bituminous coal and wax, the pickaxes become black bodies and the labor behind the grand courthouses and their drawings. Southern courthouses were the epicenter of the neo-slavery system and lynchings, and before that, the site of slave markets and auctions. The drawings of Alabama courthouses depict the judicial infrastructure that was built from expanded revenue and treasuries, which benefited from and maintained slavery well into the 20th century. And as Blackmon concludes, “As painful as it may be to plow the past, among the ephemera left behind by generations crushed in the wheels of American white supremacy are telling explanations for the fissures that still thread our society. In fact, these events explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.”