Growing Activism: Undocumented Students/DREAM Act

VYGOTSKY'S DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY: AN INTRODUCTION

B.F. SKINNER: A FRESH APPRAISAL

Ghosts of Southern Neo-Slavery

The violation was known as "vagrancy." If you were a black man in the South following Reconstruction,
and you were unable to show proof of employment on-demand to the police, you could be arrested and
delivered into what Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name, calls "Neo-Slavery."

"Show me your papers" in the vernacular of the late 19th Century through World War II involved furnishing pay stubs or,
if you were lucky, the word of your employer -- some kind of evidence proving to a police officer that you were employed.

But what if you forgot to carry your employment records with you when you left the house that morning? What if you were
-- like so many regular citizens -- unaware of the anti-vagrancy law? Hell, what if you were simply unemployed?
It might be your last mistake as a free citizen of the United States.

Like so many other African American males of that era, you might be incarcerated, convicted and perhaps sold
to a farming, mining or lumber operation. Yes, sold. After the Civil War. After the abolition of slavery and the
ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Slavery, it turns out, survived.


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