Links For Peonage Research

Dozier School

Johnny Lee Gaddy

Things got worse. Not long after, Gaddy was driving the tractor while taking trash from the field to burn it in the fire pit. There, says Gaddy, he looked down and saw the severed hand of a child. “I told one of the boys I’d seen a body part” at the pit and he told me, “Johnny, don’t ever repeat that again because you could end up in that pit. They don’t want anybody to know what’s happening here.” 
Photo Credit: Walter C. Black, Sr.

Louis Allen

NATIONWIDE
 Nationwide — Peonage Detective Dr. Antoinette Harrell has revealed through her research that the legendary civil rights activist, Louis Allen, was sold for $20 before his untimely death in 1926. Her research on peonage included a trip to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where she was particularly interested in the cases in the southern states. In contrast, she examined the documents carefully, looking at and analyzing each one with a methodical and logical approach. There was a newspaper clipping published by the Associated Press, New Orleans, Feb 3, 1926, entitled “Two Accused of Selling Negro Family” which quickly caught Harrell’s attention to dig deeper into this story related to Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana.
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Mae Louise Walls Miller
 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.” Miller and her sister Annie’s tale of bondage ended in the ’60s — not the 1860s, when slaves officially were freed after the Civil War, but the 1960s.  ABC News
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Arthur Walls
With over 3.4 million views for Vice Media, Akil Gibbons hosts and produces this story on “The Slavery Detective of the South” meeting genealogist Antoinette Harrell, who tracks down cases of modern-day slavery and abusive labor practices. We talk to a man – Arthur Wall – whose family was held on a plantation against their will into the 1960s, and Antoinette explains how she uses decades-old records to uncover how slavery was perpetuated long after the Civil War ended into modern day.
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