Black southerners living under Jim Crow spoke again and again of detainment based on little more than whim. Charges of walking along a railroad track, spitting, drinking, loitering, vagrancy, and speaking too loudly in public were applied almost exclusively to African Americans and put thousands in prison. States and counties could then profitably lease these men’s unpaid labor to employers ranging from private plantation owners to U.S. Steel and the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. Convicts were often assigned to the most arduous and dangerous jobs and were treated brutally. Once in the prison labor system, they lived for an average of just seven years. Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century newspapers denounced the convict leasing system as “disgraceful” and “worse than slavery,” but nevertheless it thrived in many parts of the South until World War II.

One of the most searing accounts of debt peonage, excessive sentencing, and penal labor is John L. Spivak’s book Georgia Nigger, published in 1932 and later republished as Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang. Spivak, a communist reporter, was granted access to chain gangs by the Georgia Prison Commission. His book, based in part on his experiences with black prisoners, combines documentary journalism and politicized fiction and is generously illustrated with his own hard-hitting photographs.

The photograph below captures the conditions in which many convicts lived and labored. Claustrophobic wagons equipped with bunks shuttled inmates from worksite to worksite. A white officer, rifle in hand, keeps watch over the men as bloodhounds used to hunt down escapees stand by.