Zimmerman Verdict

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    Zimmerman Verdict: The Slave Patrol Is Aliveand Well in FloridaMonday, 15 July 2013 13:26By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

    Slave Patrols, the militias of the Second Amendment. (Image:Patrick Feller / Flickr)

    George Zimmerman kept close watch over his neighborhood.

    When Black men walked or even drove through the area,he alerted the police, over and over and over

    again.

    Finally, exasperated that they always got away, he went out on a rainy night armed with a loaded gun

    and the Stand Your Ground law, looking for anybody who should not be in his largely White

    neighborhood.

    The South has a long history of this sort of thing. Today theyre called Neighborhood Watches. They used

    to be called Slave Patrols.

    Prior to the Civil War and Reconstruction, the main way Southern states maintained the institution of

    slavery was through local and statewide militias, also known as Slave Patrols. These Patrols were, in

    many states, required monthly duty for southern white men between the ages of 17 and 47, be they slave-

    owners or not.

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    Slave patrollers traveled, usually on horseback [the modern equivalent would be in a car], through the

    countryside looking for African-Americans who were not where they belong. When the patrollers found

    Black people in places where they did not belong, punishment ranged from beatings, to repatriation to

    their slave owners, to death by being whipped, hung or shot.

    Some of the most comprehensive reports on the nature and extent of the Slave Patrolscame from interviews done by the WPA (the Works Progress Administration, a New

    Deal program created by FDR) during the Great Depression. At that time, former slaves

    and the children of former slaves were still alive and had stories to tell, and the WPA put

    people to work in the American South gathering and documenting those stories.

    TheWPAs Georgia Writers Project, Savannah Unit,produced a brilliant summary of

    storiestaken from people who were alive (most as children) during the time of slavery,

    about their and their families interactions with slave patrollers. The reports title was

    Drums and Shadows: survival stories among the Georgia coastal Negroes,

    Many other oral and written histories compiled by the WPA Writers Projectare now

    maintained by the library of Congress.

    Dozens of other similar reports, as well as detailed state-by-state studies of slave patrols,

    even including membership rosters,are published in Sally E. Haddens brilliant

    bookSlave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas.

    Hadden cites numerous stories and scores of sources about how the slave patrollers

    would beat, whip, or otherwise abuse African-Americans who were found off the

    plantation. Women were routinely subjected to rape, and men were usually beaten with

    sticks or whips. Hadden writes of the stories compiled by the WPA:

    Slaves might beg to be left out of a whipping from the patrol, hoping that mercy or

    caprice might avert a beating. Patrollers sometimes toyed with a slave, threatening a

    whipping, then let the slaves go free. The inherent arbitrariness of punishment added to

    the fear most slaves felt when they encountered slave patrols.

    One former bondsmen [slave], Alex Woods, recalled how a patrol reacted to a begging

    slave. He said that the patrollers wouldn't allow [slaves] to call on de Lord when dey

    werewippinem but they let em say, Oh! pray, Oh! pray, marster.

    The harsh punishment a patrol could administer caused one former slave to like

    meeting the patrol with being sold to a new master a slave would seek to avoid both

    fates at any cost. Few things compared to the agony a slave endured from a patroller

    beating. One ex-slave from South Carolina recalled what people heard when she was

    born: her mother screamed as if she were being beaten by patrollers.

    http://www.amazon.com/Drums-Shadows-Survival-Studies-Georgia/dp/1604443243http://www.amazon.com/Drums-Shadows-Survival-Studies-Georgia/dp/1604443243http://www.amazon.com/Drums-Shadows-Survival-Studies-Georgia/dp/1604443243http://www.amazon.com/Drums-Shadows-Survival-Studies-Georgia/dp/1604443243http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/http://www.amazon.com/Slave-Patrols-Violence-Carolinas-Historical/dp/0674012348http://www.amazon.com/Slave-Patrols-Violence-Carolinas-Historical/dp/0674012348http://www.amazon.com/Slave-Patrols-Violence-Carolinas-Historical/dp/0674012348http://www.amazon.com/Slave-Patrols-Violence-Carolinas-Historical/dp/0674012348http://www.amazon.com/Slave-Patrols-Violence-Carolinas-Historical/dp/0674012348http://www.amazon.com/Slave-Patrols-Violence-Carolinas-Historical/dp/0674012348http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/http://www.amazon.com/Drums-Shadows-Survival-Studies-Georgia/dp/1604443243http://www.amazon.com/Drums-Shadows-Survival-Studies-Georgia/dp/1604443243
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    The National Humanities Centerreprinted an 1857 account by Austin Steward, who

    escaped slavery in 1813. Titled Slaves and Slave Patrol, Steward opens the account

    with this summary:

    Slaves are never allowed to leave the plantation to which they belong, without a written

    pass. Should anyone venture to disobey this law, he will most likely be caught by thepatrol and given thirty-nine lashes. This patrol is always on duty every Sunday, going to

    each plantation under their supervision, entering every slave cabin, and examining

    closely the conduct of the slaves; and if they find one slave from another plantation

    without a pass, he is immediately punished with a severeflogging.

    He then goes on to tell several harrowing stories of personal encounters with the slave

    patrol, including one that led to the death of six slaves, and reprints the North Carolina

    Slave Patrol regulations as follows:

    SLAVE PATROL REGULATIONS, ROWAN COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA, 1825

    1st. Patrols shall be appointed, at least four in each Captain's district.

    2d. It shall be their duty, for two of their number, at least, to patrol their respective districts once in every

    week; in failure thereof, they shall be subject to the penalties prescribed by law.

    3d. They shall have power to inflict corporal punishment, if two be present agreeing thereto.

    4th. One patroller shall have power to seize any negro slave who behaves insolently to a patroller, or

    otherwise unlawfully or suspiciously; and hold such slave in custody until he can bring together a requisite

    number of Patrollers to act in the business.

    5th. Previous to entering on their duties, Patrols shall call on some acting magistrate, and take the

    following oath, to wit: "I, A. B. appointed one of the Patrol by the County Court of Rowan, for Captain B's

    company, do hereby swear, that I will faithfully execute the duties of a Patroller, to the best of my ability,

    according to law and the regulations of the County Court.

    The National Humanities Center has many other similar reports in its archives.

    Slave Patrols were a regular feature of the South, from its first settlement by slave-

    owning Europeans until the decades after Reconstruction.

    When slavery was abolished, but Whites in the South still wanted to keep Blacksin

    their place, the Slave Patrols were largely replaced by (or simply renamed as) the KKK,

    small-town sheriffs, stop-and-frisk policies, and, apparently, Neighborhood Watch.

    http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/community/text2/plantationsteward.pdfhttp://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/community/text2/plantationsteward.pdfhttp://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/community/text2/plantationsteward.pdfhttp://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/community/text2/plantationsteward.pdf
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    Slave Patrollers rarely stopped or molested white people. But when Blacks were found in

    unexpected places, they could expect a swift and severe punishment.

    And the legal systems of the South, largely without exception, backed up the Slave

    Patrollers and their post-reconstruction heirs.

    It appears that the more things change - at least in the deep South - the more they stay

    the same.

    This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form

    without permission or license from the source.