Abstract
Slavery After Slavery: Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families, From Emancipation to the Present brings attention to an often-overlooked mechanism used by white planters to exploit Black labor after the Civil War: apprenticeships. The book is written by Dr. Mary Frances Berry, a historian and University of Pennsylvania Professor Emerita. Berry explains that in this post-war period, apprenticeships were a means to supply the economically depressed South with needed workers at no cost. Although akin to child trafficking, apprenticing formerly enslaved children was commonplace, with more than 2,500 Black children apprenticed in the South in the month following emancipation.
Using court decisions as one of her main data sources, Dr. Berry tells the stories of Black families contending with forced apprenticeships. Through these families’ experiences, the reader learns how former enslavers were able to apprentice children, often without parental consent; the effects of apprenticeships on children and their families; and the legacy of these apprenticeships on family members’ descendants. Many Southern states passed legislation after slavery ended to make it easier for planters to maintain the status quo of using Black children as unpaid plantation labor. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibited one's previous condition of servitude from being used as a basis for discrimination in the making of contracts, apprenticeship laws relied on slavery's impacts on the formerly enslaved to justify taking children away from their parents.
Parents’ precarious economic status was used against them—even though access to their own children's labor could have helped improve their economic conditions—and the illegality of enslaved persons' marriages meant that their children were deemed illegitimate and therefore the responsibility of the state. Partners may have died or been sold away during slavery, making it impossible or difficult to marry after abolition. The marginalized status of women, especially single mothers, was also used as a legal rationale for apprenticing children by deeming these mothers “loose” and “unfit.” Despite the obstacles they faced, parents fought in court for custody of their children, sometimes winning victories that benefited other Black Americans facing the loss of their children to the indentured servitude of apprenticeships.
An obvious and serious outcome of forced child apprenticeships was the separation of family members and disruption of personal ties. Additionally, parents and their children endured psychological abuse like that inflicted during slavery. White planters used family members as proxies to fight for control of Black children in court, and former enslavers even convinced children to say that their parents were unfit or abusive and that they preferred to stay with their former enslaver.
Slavery After Slavery contextualizes the stories told in its pages with the historical conditions of the post-emancipation period as well as the circumstances of Black Americans today. One way Berry does this is by juxtaposing the fortunes of biracial children (and their descendants), born to an enslaved mother and a white father, who were treated differently by their fathers after slavery ended. In Chapter 10, “The Other Bridgeforths,” the reader learns that one such son was provided money, land, and business assistance by his white father, which led him to become the largest Black landowner in Limestone County, Alabama, by 1910. His son, in turn, worked with George Washington Carver at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, and went on to encourage Black cooperative farming and found an all-Black community in the northern part of the state. This Bridgeforth family was successful in many ways, but continued discrimination against Black people limited their prosperity. Unlike the provided-for George Bridgeforth, many of the formerly enslaved worked as sharecroppers, farm wage laborers, or domestic workers, with few opportunities for education and economic advancement.
Slavery After Slavery: Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families, from Emancipation to the Present makes a notable contribution to the history of apprenticeships and the enduring effects of slavery, white supremacy, and racial inequality in the United States. Berry briefly draws distinctions between the forced child apprenticeships she features and apprenticeships prior to the Civil War or those implemented by Black parents themselves after the war. Further investigation of these distinctions would help labor scholars better understand the history of this unique labor relation. Scholars and members of the public, especially those with ties to the South, will benefit from learning the forgotten stories profiled in this book. For anyone who may have familial connections to these individuals, their stories and the ancestry information presented in the appendix are especially valuable resources.
