The Culture of Black Incarceration

“If a black was convicted of vagrancy or some minor offense (petty larceny, drunkenness), and fined, he became… in effect a kind of slave; he was turned over to a white employer who paid the fine and got a laborer in return (Lawrence 95)”

In this chapter of Crime and Punishment in American History, author Lawrence Friedman is discussing the incarceration of black men in Post-Reconstruction America. Reconstruction was a confusing time in America. When the Civil War ended there was chaos in the south. The southern economy was crippled not only by the free work force it lost, but by the price tag for the war. During the years of Reconstruction the incarceration rates of newly freed slaves skyrocketed. Often they would be incarcerated for the most ridiculous crimes. They would be arrested and put to work on a chain gang.

Incarceration is a reoccurring theme in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. The first time we hear about it in the play is at the very beginning. Jeremy is not at breakfast because he was picked up by the police for hanging out after work. Later on in the play we find out that Herald Loomis did a seven year bid on the chain gang. On page 74 of my text Loomis says, “I was walking down this road in this little town outside of Memphis. Come up on these fellows gambling. I stooped to preach to these fellows to see if maybe I could turn some of them from their sinning when Joe Tunrer, brother of the Governor of the great sovereign state of Tennessee, swooped down on us and grabbed everybody there. Kept us all seven years. My wife Martha hone from me after Joe Turner catched me…I just wanna see her face so I can get me a starting place in the world(Wilson 74).” This bit of information is critical. Not only does it tell how the play got its title, but it explains why Herald Loomis is lost.

One hundred years after men like Herald Loomis went to prison black men are still going to jail at alarming numbers. According to an essay published in Being a Black Man: At the Corner of Progress Peril, Hamil Harris and Ben De La Cruz are quoted saying, “More than a fifth of all black men ages 35 to 44 have been to prison—twice the percentage pf Hispanic men and six times the percentage of white men in the same age group. If current incarceration rates hold, Justice Department statisticians project, about one in three black males will go to state or federal prison during their lifetimes. One of every 14 black children has a parent in prison. Since 1954, when 98,000 blacks were incarcerated, the black prison population has grown to nearly 1 million. Although blacks account for just 12 percent of the population of the U.S. population, 44 percent of all inmates are black. In each state in this nation, the percentage of blacks in prison exceeds the percentage of African Americans in the general population (Being 239).”

In the past thirty years incarceration has become apart of the culture of black poverty. In some black communities going to jail has become a rite of passage. I think what has happened is that for so long so man black people were going to jail that it became a way of life. I love this play because August Wilson does a great job of putting the culture of black incarceration into perspective for the theatre world. It dose not take much to connect the dots from 1865, to 1911, to 2009.

Works Cited

Being a Black Man At the Corner of Progress and Peril. New York: PublicAffairs, 2007. Print.

Friedman, Lawrence M. Crime and Punisment in American History. Basic Books, 1994. Print.

Wilson, August. Joe Turner's Come and Gone: a play in two acts. New American Library, 1988. Print.