Today I am excerpting a passage from a Ph.D. dissertation by Dr. Susan Thomas at UNC-Greensboro. The excerpt focuses on a convict labor strike in Perquimans County, N.C., in 1935 that played a key role in ending the practice of flogging prisoners on chain gangs and in the state's prisons.
Convict labor
The Spirits Damn’d
Today I want to talk about slavery, convict labor and the construction of the old Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C. I was first led to do this historical research many years ago, when I was documenting a hunger strike at the prison in its last days. It is not something one forgets easily.
David Cecelski 