◆ SpookStack

Tom: | HELENA, Arkansas, Mar. 18, 1944— | aus: vofits,| The peonage trial of Albert Sydney | their yvery | Johnson, 50-year-old planter, ended in But tirike | Federal Court here today when the| of qu ‘o in- | defendant changed his innocent plea! Jt is on two counts to guilty and was sen-} jiticc: pora- tenced to two and one-half years in} wo, 3ING prison. Johnson, wealthy Cross County conte ‘ owner of a 2,000 acre plantation, was ‘ ensa-| charged with forcing white and Negro mate “ances|sharecroppers into peonage. Wit-| tell t- venty| nesses testified that they had re-| wor! »ora- | mained on the plantation through fear | been : Jeft| induced by Johnson. in 1 The trial of Albert Sydney Johnson reveals the likeness of an America hidden in the ravines and morasses where the light of our civilization penetrates but dinty. It is another America than the one we know—it is the America more than 9,000,000 men, women and children of the share- ‘cropper country know only too well. In the year 1944, in the midst of a great world struggle to determine whether men may live in freedum, a powerful landowner has enforced the serfdom of free-born Americans who work his lands. It is merely incidental that this man has been brought to justice. The important fact is that the moral climate exists in this country which permits the assertion of the right uf the master by one and submission in the role of the serf by mary. ' ~ How can this be? The antecedents of this crime go back to post- Civil War days. On the one hand were the land- less freed slave and the penniless reiurned soldier; on the other hand. the bankrupt. burned- out landowner. Their sole source of productive wealth was the land. Between them they reached an accommodation: the worker to till the land- lord’s soil, the crop to be shared. Thus sharecrop- ping began in America as a beneficent arrange- ment, fair to both the tuiler and the landlord. With the decades the old equitable relation: ship withered and died. The landlord was ground Ltween the rmillstunes of a wasting soil and a speculative market. In too many instances his sole hope of survival lay in the exploitation of the labor of the worker and his family. Gradually the worker's portion grew less, his debts ac- cumulated. A custom arose Lhat he was bound to the soil he worked so long as he was in debt to the landlord. So with misery and malnutrition peonage came to the South. Photo by Margatet Lourke-White And peonage has persisted. The econumic and social causes which produced it are still present. The interests which profit fram a fixed. cheap labur supply are sufficiently powerful to have established in the luw that no agricultural worker in the South may move from his county with the help of federal fueds unless he has the consent of the County Extension Agent, appointee uf the biz planters. And through the poll tax. which discafranchives alecost the whole oft the Neuro anc poor hire Jie Hatton those same tilerests enforce polit: abou cotenee a the wred ded Theives i. 0 pon ob Sate yess deiiio creates the moral climate in which alone the crime of Albert Sydney Johnson is possible. Their policy is administered through centro! «{ loral gos ernments, the school system, and ofttimes th. press and pulpit. It is a policy which fosters strife between the poor white and the Negro and which makes primary education as meager as possible; a policy which withholds the vote from more than 2,000,000 young men of the share- etopper country defending Aserica’s cause on world battlehelds. The crime of Albert Sydney Johnsan is but -' a small thing. For all around it a vast crime is being committed which is the more horrible in: that its victims are a whole population; it is the meaner since it is committed without risk. It is the social crime which brings ignurance and poverty and disease to 9,000,000 fellow-Ameri- cans. The guilty are Congressmen and editors, bankers and plantation-owners and businessmen; | - al] those who profit from the degradation of a - people, and all those who stand silently hy. Even: you and I. :