peonageWriter

People were lynched, I was thirteen years old when I saw my first lynching.” If you tried to get away, them people would come and get you,” he said. They made my uncle dig his own grave and then they shot him. They were some people in Mississippi. They didn’t put on KKK hoods they … Read more

Johnny Lee Gaddy-ABC Action News I took a lot of garbage there all the time.  But that particular time I saw a hand, a boy’s hand,” Gaddy recalled.  “I asked, ‘What’s a hand doing in here?’  He said, I’ll tell you, don’t ever mention that to nobody because you can end up like that.’  So … Read more

I went to Progress, Mississippi every summer to plant and pick cotton and other produce on the place with my grandfather. Every year he was told that he didn’t make out. That was a sad day at the house for us. My grandfather was up in age where he couldn’t walk and he would be … Read more

Mae Louise Wall Miller, by ABC NEWS As Mae Miller tells it, she spent her youth in Mississippi as a slave, “picking cotton, pulling corn, picking peas, picking butter beans, picking string beans, digging potatoes. Whatever it was, that’s what you did for no money at all.” “They beat us,” Mae Miller said. “They didn’t … Read more