Good Roads and Anti-Black Violence

Abstract

Following Progressive-era advocacy (1890–1930), a modernized road work site emerged in the U.S. South designed to be populated by mobile fleets of Black imprisoned laborers. The forced road work dislodged U.S. roads from their localized production and maintenance so they could assume an expert-led, technological form—physically and discursively. On the road, however, labor was merely a means of violently reifying hierarchical racial differences, making the “good road” a monument to the modern persistence of state-enacted anti-Blackness. This article assesses the emergence of this regional, racial system of anti-Black violence alongside the undertheorized spatial situation of the imprisoned laborers themselves by consulting the report of Bayard Rustin following time spent on a Roxboro, North Carolina, prison road work camp. The report recounts his own experiences along with those of other men, as well as their songs. The laborers’ firsthand accounts foreground persistent desires for loves, families, and homes beyond the racial capitalist traumas undergirding U.S. transportation geographies.

1890至1930年期间, 根据“进步时代”倡议（Progressive era）, 美国南部出现了黑人监狱劳工流动居住的现代化筑路工地。强制筑路抹去了美国道路建设和维护的本地化特征, 从而可以采用专家主导的、物理和描述上的技术形式。然而, 筑路劳动仅仅是通过暴力实现种族等级差异的一种手段, “优质道路”成为国家反黑人政策的纪念碑。本文通过Bayard Rustin对北卡罗来纳州Roxboro监狱劳工筑路营地的报告, 评价了这一区域性和种族性反黑人暴力体系的出现, 揭示了监狱劳工空间状况理论的匮乏。报告叙述了Bayard Rustin等人的经历和歌曲。第一手劳工资料显示了美国运输地理的种族资本主义伤害, 尤其显示出对爱情、家庭和家园的持续渴望。

Después de la defensa de la era progresista (1890–1930), surgió en el Sur americano una obra vial modernizada, pensada para ser poblada con flotas móviles de trabajadores negros encarcelados. El trabajo forzado de carretera privó a las carreteras de los Estados Unidos de su producción y mantenimiento localizados para que se pudiere asumir una forma tecnológica dirigida por expertos –física y discursivamente–. En la carretera, sin embargo, el trabajo era apenas un medio violento para reificar las diferencias raciales jerárquicas, haciendo de la “buena carretera” un monumento a la persistencia moderna de la anti-negritud promulgada por el Estado. Este artículo evalúa la aparición de este sistema regional y racial de violencia anti-negra junto con la situación espacial escasamente teorizada de los propios trabajadores presos, consultando el informe de Bayard Rustin, luego de su tiempo pasado en prisión en un campo de trabajo de carretera en Roxboro, Carolina del Norte. El informe da cuenta de propias experiencias junto con las de otros hombres, así como sus canciones. Los relatos de primera mano de los trabajadores destacan los deseos persistentes de amores, familias y hogares, más allá de los traumas raciales capitalistas inmersos en las geografías del transporte de los Estados Unidos.

Key Words:

• Black geographies
• racial violence
• roads

关键词:

• 黑人地理
• 种族暴力
• 道路。

Palabras clave:

• carreteras
• geografías negras
• violencia racial

Throughout the United States, modern roads and highways permit the steady transport of people and goods. Their reliable connectivity elides a less certain origin story. Indeed, the twentieth-century production of expertly planned roads relied on the unstable consensus of progressives, agricultural conservatives, and a nascent industry. In the South, maintaining the racial order long ranked as a more pressing matter than road construction. Marrying the race-based interests of the agrarian elite with a Good Roads vision would be a pivotal step in creating the U.S. road landscape of today, which is the product of a historic transformation. The modern U.S. road landscape resulted from persistent, collective effort.

The Good Roads movement (1870s–1930) began with a group of Northeastern bicyclists. Eventually, it became a nationwide coalition of motorists, progressives, and scientists calling for federal and state governments to produce expertly planned and maintained roads throughout the country. Before Good Roads advocacy and subsequent legislation, U.S. farmers and locals maintained personal ties to the few, typically unreliable wagon roads for which they were responsible. After rains or other natural, everyday events, many became impassable. As the materialized Good Roads promised rapid transit through space, their fruition in the Southern United States would mean the deliberate deployment of mostly Black convict laborers on the fluctuating road work sites and thus the road itself.

Before the turn of the twentieth century, convict labor was a fix for road improvement costs, activists-cum-state officials argued, with multiple additional benefits, including offsetting prison housing costs and improving the health of those imprisoned. When convict road labor was essentially a proposed experiment, Good Roads technocrats imagined a relatively less depraved system of labor exploitation than what would materialize. One early Good Road government official was General Roy Stone, a prominent advocate of federally aided road construction. Indeed, Stone was more activist than bureaucrat. State geologists and Stone’s Office of Road Inquiry imagined forced laborers who might live in their own homes, gain transferrable skills, and receive compensation after a sentence (Stone and U.S. Bureau of Public Roads 1898). Such a system was impossible insofar as state adoption depended on accommodating a fearful Southern agrarian elite who lamented a modernizing landscape that might jeopardize any racially meted power. To assuage their concerns, Good Roads actors ultimately championed a race-based system stripped of humane ideals.

This article argues that violence was a motivating factor for U.S. road development. Indeed, if in careful calculations, the Good Road activists reasoned that humane labor practices would yield the most desirable outcome for productivity (Stone and U.S. Bureau of Public Roads 1898; Southern Good Roads 1910a; Ireland 1991), how else could the road work site become one of depravity? Via Woods’s blues epistemology and archival analysis of Good Roads materials and laborer accounts, technocratic visions calling for Black convict labor are linked to reported experiences on a segregated roadwork prison camp in Roxboro, North Carolina). Although it is evident that the labor conditions were exploitive, the laborers’ accounts delineate specific experiences of racialized violence, alienation, and deprivation in the mobile camps that Good Roads activists imagined as rehabilitative decades earlier. The narratives and songs enculturate the modern road as a reprised and irredeemable site of plantation violence.

By considering the convict laborers’ songs against the backdrop of the Progressive road policy, this article highlights how despite being technocratic endeavors working to eschew place—in favor of transit—the purposively abstracted road is yet a particular setting for Black productions of spatial alterity, which reckon with the immediate conditions of racialized captivity there while imagining other locations. Consult of the laborers’ verses is not meant to romanticize imprisonment or forced labor (Hartman 1997). Instead, these songs are analyzed to unsettle some fruit of those tragedies: the modern U.S. road system. Woods (2002) wrote: “While [the] bulwarks of inequality may be hidden by disciplinary practices, they are firmly embedded in the consciousness of repressed groups … who are entangled in a growing web of inequality” (64). While history readers could place culpability on road planners and technocrats (Ireland 1991; Lichtenstein 1993), the men explicitly wrote and belted their experiences “on the road” and thus squarely situate the American South’s legacy of racial violence and personal tragedies of lovelessness. In the context of this article, the modern Southern road is an opportunistic and deadly monument to systematically enacted anti-Blackness.

The following sections position analysis in reference to work concerning U.S. development, transportation geography, and conceptual discourse in Black studies, including Woods’s (1998) “blues epistemology.” Following this discussion, the article shares materials and methods. Next, the article covers the modernizing and racialized production of Good Roads using secondary literature and archival materials such as Good Roads meeting minutes. The article analyzes the firsthand report of a segregated roadwork labor camp in North Carolina, with particular attention given to recorded songs. Additional songs and their historical context are then discussed before the conclusion.

As the convict road labor system materialized, federal actors and Good Roads activists expressed racist sentiments regarding prison laborers in correspondence and state-level reports. For example, in defense of racially uneven convict road labor, the 1912 federal Office of Public Roads assistant director Julien Wilson said Black people were more suited for convict road work because they “do not possess the same aversion to working in public … as is characteristic of the white race” (Lichtenstein 1993, 106). Thrown into racialized “public” road work, Black imprisoned men and women laborers found themselves wrestling with a particularly alienating situation (Haley 2016).

More than a means of producing modernized roads—like lynching, massacres, and the Ku Klux Klan—the road labor would serve a racializing function by creating Black fear and incapacitation (Gilmore 2002, 2007). Unsanitary, densely populated road work camps would create intimacy between Blackness and filth in anticipation of urban ghettoization and the contemporary pervasion of waste in Black communities (Sugrue 1996; Taylor 2014; Vasudevan 2021). Further, considering what state prisons would become—alienating zones of systemic genocide—road development was only a fleeting feature of U.S. carcerality’s long-standing enactment of racism (Gilmore 2002, 2007).

In the hands of an agrarian-led state, an established tradition of anti-Black dehumanization and terror stemming from the plantation (McKittrick 2011) swiftly subsumed any humane notions about the treatment of laborers. As Lichtenstein (1993) argued, for the land-owning class, “the penal system could be used as a powerful sanction against rural Blacks who challenged the racial order upon which agricultural labor control relied” (13), and for “planters denied recourse to the slave whip, the chain gang served as an important element of rural labor discipline” (2). Rather than a feature of modernity, the Good Road would ultimately be the spatial residue left from state-enacted disciplining and breaking Black men and women under the Southern sun (Haley 2016). Accounts from Black imprisoned road laborers recall senses of place darkened by alienation, gratuitous violence, and demands for self-abnegation (Prison Conditions [FOLDER: 001455-008-0001] 1947). Far from the humane rehabilitation system first imagined, twentieth-century road labor would be a debilitating form of punishment reserved for Black prisoners.

By 1949, the convict system dominated road building in North Carolina, and historical figure Bayard Rustin, best known as a right-hand man of Martin Luther King, Jr., found himself thrown into the midst of it. Born in 1912, Rustin was a lifelong advocate for social justice. Although his gay identity, involvement with the communist party, and time in prison for evading the draft long barred him from the spotlight, his public role in the 1963 March on Washington turned him into a well-known national figure for racial equality advocacy (Podair 2009). Before that time, he was arrested in North Carolina for sitting outside the Jim Crow section of a bus. After surrendering to the Orange County, North Carolina, officials, Rustin received a short sentence on a prison labor camp or chain gang. There he developed material for a scathing firsthand report on the state of the road labor camp entitled, “A Report on Twenty-Two Days on the Chain Gang at Roxboro, NC.” In addition to work songs and ethnographical reflections, Rustin recorded primary statistical data about the inmates, like the length of their stays and autobiographical accounts.

Although the depravity of the road work site is well noted in the literature, Rustin’s account and the laborers’ songs push analysis beyond cliched discussions of corporal and social death (Woods 2002; Hartman 2008). The laborers speak of desires for home, romantic attention, and life beyond the immediate context of the road. Such narrative and musical discursive work is an offshoot of what Sharpe (2016) called Black life “in the wake” of the plantation, or the ever-moving context of state-orchestrated U.S. anti-Blackness, which quite meaningfully flows from transatlantic encounter. The imprisoned laborers’ verses, narratives, and testimonies created a place for what Woods (1998) called the “reestablishment of collectivity” that both troubled the planners’ technocratic characterization of the Progressive road and imagined other, self-determined futures. The laborers’ voices called for life beyond the distinctly regressive function of a modernizing infrastructural landscape.

Literature Review

The contested role of anti-Blackness in producing modernity, such as with roads, has long been recognized in geography. Recent work names anti-Black violence a constitutive (but not entirely comprehensive) element of current environmental harms and global capitalist expansion (Pulido 2017; Wright 2018; Bledsoe and Wright 2019). Black senses of place archive and imagine alternatives to hegemonic pasts and presents. A notable focus is racial capitalism’s dependence on “intimate” devaluations of Black life (Wright 2018; Vasudevan 2021). McKittrick (2011) described a Black sense of place as “the process of materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter” (949). This article offers insight into the material scale of what an emancipatory future might entail by foregrounding Black senses of place that wholly indict the modern road. Indeed, the outcomes of road labor were a consequence of its use as a debilitating form of racialized punishment. For the Southern elite, prison captains, and guards, animating anti-Blackness was a more urgent and dominant charge than the production of roads.

This work follows Wilson’s (2000) American Johannesburg and Mitchell’s The Lie of the Land, delineating the hegemonic calculus of modernizing U.S. development (Mitchell 1996, 2011). Geographers of the South have further considered how despite attempts to claim colorblind policies, local and state governments in the region remain responsible for toponyms, infrastructures, and means of development wrought by racial legacies of violence, unpaid labor, and inequitable distribution of resources and opportunity (Wilson 2000; Alderman and Inwood 2013; Domosh 2015). Altogether, these works suggest that as Southern farming power centralized and became regionally supplanted by industrialization and capitalist enterprise, the region’s legacy of racial antagonism proved steadfast. This article contributes a distinct focus on the twentieth-century development of Southern roads to the literature that exposes the inequitable and modernizing development of U.S. landscapes. It also offers a focused assessment of how anti-Black violence, rather than development, is more aim than means.

Questioning social differentiation on and through roadways has led to mobility debates assessing the political power imbalances potentiating road-building projects and their uneven distributions (e.g., Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012; Harvey and Knox 2012). In these cases, the road is a produced object with inequitable social outcomes at the scale of settlements and communities. The physical manifestation of road infrastructure, however, relied on social differences via racialized forced occupation of roads. Indeed, insofar as U.S. road projects, following Good Roads advocacy, unequally harmed the maintenance and continuity of Black collectivity vis-à-vis Black downtowns and neighborhoods (Bullard, Johnson, and Torres 2004), the creation of the modern U.S. road wreaked immediate, inequitable havoc at the most intimate of human geographic scales—that of Black imprisoned laborers’ minds and bodies. Immediate refers to the road impeding the laborers’ well-being as they constructed it.

Good Roads advocates called for an end to leasing convict labor out to private enterprises in favor of state-run prison road work. Indeed, they were the first to call for such road labor, and as they became leaders of state road agencies, as with Roy Stone, they would usher in such a system while conforming to Southern demands for newly institutionalized anti-Blackness (Ireland 1991; Lichtenstein 1993). In this light, the modern U.S. road, however inequitably spread from coast to coast, is a relic of terror as the imprisoned laborers faced captivity there along with inhumane conditions and ultimate untimely deaths.

Cultural productions of the laborers themselves—narratives and recorded songs—archive conditions of the road work site and identify the modernizing U.S. road as a particular place of familiar (vis-à-vis the plantation) yet no less harrowing terror. Merriman (2004) considered movement across England’s M1 Motorway implicating various “placings” for travelers against prior discussion of roadway technologies devoid of placeness. He centered lived experiences of meaning-making on the roadway, which works against compelling arguments that roads are characteristically “placeless” (Relph 1976) and “non-places” (Augé 1992). Comparatively, Edensor (2003) also considered firsthand emplacing experiences of driving along a particular road, England’s M6 Motorway. This article shows how the road, even as a proper abstraction, is appropriated in convict laborers’ narrated and melodic archive of transgressions in the flux of the moving work site. Paradoxically, even as the prison road work camps were designed to move from one section to another quickly, the laborers’ songs refer to “the road” as a particular site of inhumane spatial captivity.

Theoretical Framework

This study aims to grapple with the road work site’s inhospitalities for its technocratic determination and its physical condition. Such inhospitalities have prompted Black cultural and social negotiations of ongoing anti-Black violence. Both Sharpe and Woods offered essential insight into such alienating, firsthand encounters with the reverberations of slavery and the unlikely, mundane persistence of Black emplacement. Sharpe considered the conditions predicating Black collectivity “in the wake” (Sharpe 2016). In Development Arrested, Woods (1998) developed the term “blues epistemology” to foreground the unique worldview established by twentieth-century African Americans following the bloody failure of Reconstruction.

In one sense, the “wake” of interest to Sharpe (2016) refers to the troubled water that trails behind ships. Metaphorically, the historical disturbance of Black life, trailing behind slavery, is the inescapable situation in which collective Black livelihood manifests. Sharpe considered her own family’s stories of tragedy “to mourn and to illustrate the ways our individual lives move through in the wake produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the ever-flowing afterlives of slavery” (Sharpe 2016, 8). Indeed, the trailing conditions following slavery, the wake moves the sad songs themselves from the plantation to a 1940s chain gang, trailing from one site of captivity to another. On plantations, songs sung during work were morose expressions (Gioia 2006; Thompson 2014). Enslaved person and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1846) wrote, “Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.” The movement of work songs from the plantation to the road site, over some decades, relays the persistent collective dissatisfaction with the conditions characteristic of both enslavement and incarceration. Further, the genealogy reflects a seamless transition of exploitative labor from the plantation to the chain gang.

Per Woods’s account, social critic Richard Wright coined the phrase “blues epistemology” in response to Black folk expressions like the blues being hardly considered by academics despite producing what Woods called the subversive “reestablishment of collective sensibility.” At the turn of the twentieth century, Mississippi Delta blues musicians and sharecroppers used music and other cultural expressions to collaboratively criticize and imagine alternatives to the iterative, intertwined harms of racial capitalism—labor exploitation and its attendant violence and woefully uneven development. In the present and at the time of Woods’s writing, the post-Reconstruction blues music materialized as an epistemological codebook that denaturalizes the racial logics animating that historic anti-Black violence and labor exploitation. Like the Delta blues musicians, the imprisoned laborers considered here employed song to both assert their collective personhood and subvert the volatile surveillance of the Southern white gaze. Rather than criticizing the woes of agricultural labor and caste, the Black imprisoned men criticized the racial underpinnings of their captivity, alienation, and work. Indeed, the Delta musicians and incarcerated men’s shared focus on labor reflect a collective criticism of U.S. racial capitalism in the epistemological renderings of twentieth-century Black southerners.

Both Sharpe and Woods offered reflections on multigenerational cultural responses to anti-Blackness. Perhaps, somewhat uniquely, the verses produced on the chain gangs occurred in contexts of overwhelming flux—away from homes and kin—and while imprisonment forbade even basic autonomy. The laborers could not dictate their slightest movements. In this way, the verses may urge appreciating their fleeting temporality. Their epistemological heft is meaningful, however, as is their importance in the wake.

Materials and Methods

The empirical section of this article considers the Progressive-era Good Roads activists and their Southern Good Roads publication (1910–1919), in particular, to show how their expert “gospel of good roads” preceded the retrofitting of a race-based plantation labor system in a modernizing South (Ireland 1991; Lichtenstein 1993). The publication served as the public voice of Southern Progressive road experts and proponents of the Southern Good Roads movement. Southern Good Roads, as archival documentation, is textually analyzed alongside a secondary literature review of pertinent historical texts. The empirical section goes on to textually examine a report by Bayard Rustin (“A Report on Twenty-Two Days on the Chain Gang at Roxboro, NC”) recounting his time spent on a 1940s road work prison camp in rural Roxboro, North Carolina.

Between 2014 and 2018, the author acquired archival materials from online, the North Carolina Archives and the North Carolina Collection at Wilson Library (University of North Carolina). Documents of particular interest, including Rustin’s report, were retrieved or reproduced as PDF files for highlighting and annotating, which allowed for drafting a comprehensive narrative reproduced here in the following sections. A field journal contains logs and brief descriptions for each piece of archival material.

Rustin wrote the report as a stand-alone text to call for improved prison conditions. He imagined having “liberal North Carolinians” decide how to use the information. By closely reading his testimony and transcriptions of work songs heard at the camp, I consider the prisoners’ emplaced experiences on the road via their work constructing the infrastructure explicitly in the vision of the science-minded Progressive activists. The analysis broadens to incorporate prison work songs from the same era and region that were recorded by folklorist Bruce Jackson, which also evidence an even wider-spread (i.e., regional) imprisoned negotiation of anti-Blackness in the wake of the plantation. The author verified these songs as historically synchronous with those recorded by Rustin, and there are trending themes across the songs, such as longing for romantic attention. As objects of a historical genre, twentieth-century Southern prison work songs, the cultural productions are considered together via interpretations, line readings, and historical contextualization. Altogether, the songs and Rustin’s narrative betray a spatial codification of the prison (road) work site as one of familiar yet not entirely twinned plantation exploitation.

Good Roads and the Science of Terror

Before Good Roads activists’ scientific representation of roads, many roadways were as bucolic as their surrounding environments. At the turn of the twentieth century, wagon roads were present throughout the United States and were the primary means of traveling distances too far to walk and too short for the railway. They were haphazard and worn-out paths, often impassable in poor weather (Ingram 2014). They poorly handled increasingly possible motor vehicle travel. In 1910, a U.S. Congress-commissioned report entitled Federal Aid to Good Roads posed 48,285 miles of such roadway in North Carolina (Bourne 1913). In addressing the nationwide improvement of these wagon roads, there were questions regarding the constitutionality of federal funds supporting the undertaking—such an infrastructural multistate funding situation was unprecedented (Weingroff 1996; Wells 2012). Federal policymakers debated their imminent modernization as roads became critical to the movement of new petrol trucks and the commodities they carried.

The activists formed state-level Good Roads Associations throughout the country and effectively lobbied for increased government oversight and funding of modern roads, such as with the 1916 Federal Road Act, which provided $25 million for road construction (Weingroff 1996). Despite such wins for the Good Roads movement, many Southern roads, particularly in rural areas, would remain unrefined for years and beyond the Progressive era (Preston 1991; Ingram 2014).

The success of the Good Roads movement depended on the activists first transforming regard for road construction from being a matter of everyday practice to one guided by expertise. Noting this discursive transformation in a 1911 N.C. Good Roads Circular, Pratt wrote, “The old idea that anybody can build a dirt road is fast losing ground, and our people are beginning to realize that road construction, even of dirt roads, requires the services of men who have been trained in this line of work” (Pratt 1911). Although not without challenges, the supplanting of old ideas would lead the way to significant government funding for road development. They reconfigured the administration and labor of road work (Ireland 1991; Weingroff 1996). Specifically, Good Roads advocacy yielded two integrated outcomes: state oversight of road building and the use of convict labor.

The question of federal aid to states for the development of roads in the South, like many other issues of federal funding to states, was contentious during the Progressive era (Ingram 2014). Unlike other Progressive programs, however, the use of convict labor determined the success of road building. Southern Good Roads activists hoped for each state in the South—from Texas to Virginia—to maintain a system for the employment of convict road labor. Reflecting such hopes and considering the monumental task of bringing about modern roadways throughout the South, one Good Roads periodical contribution stated, “Convict labor has been found successful wherever tried in the south, and it will prove a powerful factor in solving the problem” (Southern Good Roads 1910b).

The discursive transformation of roads into matters of science and engineering coincided with the systemic employment of convict road laborers. Mecklenburg County (North Carolina) became the first county in the state to officially sanction the use of convict labor on road construction in 1885, leading to statewide attempts at emulation. A shortage of available convicts for road work made the widespread application of the Mecklenburg approach impractical, however. Given the strained demand for convict road labor and concerns instigated by Progressive prison reformers about the potentially inhumane conditions of the county and convict leasing camps, activists made a strong case for state control of convict labor on the roads and, in some parts, also of the road construction itself. In a plea that rhetorically aligns with the prison reform discourse, North Carolina State Prison Superintendent Julian S. Mann called for state control of convict road labor. In a 1907–1908 prison report written by Mann, historian Robert E. Ireland noted that the document “was as much a blueprint for the development of a state highway system as it was a statement of prison reform” (Ireland 1991, 136). In 1933, the State Prison Department joined the State Highway Commission to form the State Highways and Public Works Commission. The union lasted until 1957, realizing the vision of Mann and the decades-long activism of Good Roads movement proponents who had consistently advocated for such a situation.

As the Progressive South’s White elite remained concerned with control, incarceration and its attendant anti-Black violence were valued tools (Lichtenstein 1993). Before the convict state road labor, imprisoned Black men and women were often leased out to private parties (Blackmon 2008). The insistence of Good Roads activists that convicts be kept for the benefit of state development appealed to concerns that the local and state governments were essentially losing money to the ongoing project of racially disciplining poor and unemployed Black men and women. Convict labor was only one component of the Good Roads vision, however, which also included aspects far less appealing to conservative Southerners.

The scientist campaign for Good Roads continued for decades. During the last decade of the Progressive era, Good Roads activists in the South—still active yet mired by some defeat—published the Southern Good Roads periodical (1910–1919). Through their writing, these activists disseminated articles and reports to create a compelling image of an American South needing a modern road and highway system. The network they imagined would be a matter of science and expertise rather than individual labor and responsibility (Wells 2006). They regarded such an improved network as critical to the livelihood of the United States. In the inaugural issue of the monthly, meant to reach laymen, experts, and farmers alike, a salutatory reads, “Just as blood to sustain the body cannot be pumped through decrepit veins, just as a railroad that consists principally of a right of way and two streaks of rust cannot develop a country, so country road that is mostly mud and mudholes and ruts and hills cannot develop a country” (Southern Good Roads 1910a, 22). For the Good Roads activists, roads had to be divorced from their particular, localized context to support national development.

The content of Southern Good Roads mainly focused on the bigger picture of road development and intricate matters concerning its development, oversight, and funding. Ads for equipment and materials also filled the pages, reflecting what would become a rapidly growing road construction industry. The periodical’s creators came to know that an inevitable development of transit in the South and the United States would depend on the fruition of the Good Roads movement vision—an abundance of linked, uniform, and expertly planned roads for the automobile. Already they worked up a particular Southern setting for the Progressive and efficient technology known as “good roads,” meant to improve communication, lessen travel time, and ensure the region’s sustenance. Such roads were characteristically technocratic; their cultural histories were hardly regarded by Southern Good Roads and only to disparage the outmoded labor tax system of road construction. The newer and improved means of road labor, the Good Roads activists contended, would be much more impactful and efficient. It would also mean difficult, alienating work for the often Black prisoners they deemed fit to do it.

Good Roads and Racialized Alienation

The activists’ sterile, scientific representation of Good Roads would clash with the real-life experience of the imprisoned laborers. The chain gang workers placed in the vision of Progressive advocacy were lodged in the systematic flux of labor camps. Of the prison camps, one proponent writing in Southern Good Roads (1910b) noted,

These camps accommodate from 50 to 60 convicts. They are located midway of a section of road to be worked so that they can work two miles in one direction and two miles in the other, and when this four-mile section is completed, they are moved to another section. In summer, they consist of canvass tents; in winter of boarded-up barracks.

Further, the dehumanizing regard of laborers led to rules forbidding activities that would outwardly foster collectivity (Rustin 1949). As such, they had to orient themselves under racial violence and the watchful eyes of guards in a way that subverted the overdetermined will of state-endorsed animalization. As blues epistemological renderings, songs and rhymes became a means of naming and critiquing that, as I describe in what follows, features the road as a devastating place and thus challenges a planner’s view of the road as a wholly improved site of advancement.

Early issues of Southern Good Roads offer many examples showing that supporters of the related movement unanimously agreed on the substantial use of convict labor for modernizing the South’s thousands of wagonways. The use of convicts, however, chiefly benefited White agriculturalists, who maintained a libidinal desire for systemic anti-Blackness just as roads were needed. Indeed, as early as 1897, state prison administrators recognized the prison system as being in a phase of experimentation concerning how it might best incapacitate free Blacks:

It must be borne in mind, in considering aspects of the criminal question in North Carolina, how large a proportion arises from the ignorant and depraved class of Negroes … The people of the South, and certainly of North Carolina, are living in a transition period, and their penal system, of necessity, is experimental. (North Carolina State Board of Charities and Public Welfare 2021)

Upon its reception, prison road labor would ultimately be a fleeting and “experimental” means of achieving the ongoing state project of Black incapacitation (Gilmore 2007; Muhammad 2010). Lichtenstein discovered through archival sources that “penal reformers [calling for more public convict laborer] hoped that white prisoners would be remanded to a central penitentiary while Blacks would work the public roads in chains since the ‘moral standard[s]’ of Blacks are ‘not lowered by this form of publicity” (Lichtenstein 1993, 90). Indeed, Lichtenstein’s claim aligns with the records of Progressive road-building proponents.

The labor of building modern roads included smoothing road surfaces, digging ditches for water runoff, and fitting the roads with material that would ensure they stayed adequate, such as macadam (Ireland 1991; Wells 2012). The process of road development was intensive and debilitating for the laborers. At the same time, Progressive Era planners remained committed to Progressive ideals of humane treatment of people, including convicts.

In the October 1910 Southern Good Roads publication, a contribution on convict labor states, “It is necessary to consider the moral and physical health of the prisoner while he is paying his debt to society” (Southern Good Roads 1910c). To square the conflict between the deprivation of convict labor and their humanitarian principles, they rested solely on a belief that the system was at least better than leasing, which would become a suspect claim with the actualization of convict road labor. One Progressive journalist lambasted the conditions of state-run prison camps in the South in a 1924 expose comparing the practice to prior convict leasing: “‘PLEASE, READER, DO NOT READ THIS CHAPTER UNLESS YOU CAN STEAL YOUR heart against pain,’ cautioned Frank Tannenbaum in his 1924 expose of conditions in southern prison camps. The catalog of horrors introduced by these words strongly resembles George Washington Cable’s earlier indictment of convict leasing, The Silent South, published in 1885” (Lichtenstein 1993, 85).

The Men Rustin Met

While imprisoned there, Rustin interviewed forty-four incarcerated men at the Roxboro State Prison. Despite the growing socioeconomic diversity of Black Americans, the men all faced the twin evils of racism and poverty. Half of the men were between twenty-one and thirty years old. The youngest was eighteen and would likely never attend one of the state’s historically Black colleges. His report primarily leaves the reader with characterizations of lack to discern who the men were. He noted little formal education. He described each as poor and labeled 70 percent “unskilled laborers” (Rustin 1949, 36–37). By the 1980s, Black men like those at the Roxboro State Prison—Black, poor, and “unskilled”—would routinely face incarceration. In their case, the ultimate goal of imprisonment would be their incapacitation rather than free labor and their removal from urban cores (Gilmore 2007; Muhammad 2010). In this light, the road work performed on the Roxboro camp in remote settings would perhaps quite literally make possible the imminent swift transit of the imprisoned laborers’ heirs from populated cities to typically far-flung state prisons.

The men Rustin met navigated the South during the Jim Crow era. Laws mandating racial segregation marked the period and persisted from the 1870s until the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The rules systematically disadvantaged Black Americans by denying access to education, housing, employment, and health care. The laws also forbade racial mixing in public spaces such as buses, bathrooms, and swimming pools. As with Rustin, defiance meant severe punishment, such as chain gang labor. In addition, the threat of unchecked anti-Black violence constantly loomed during the era. Lynch mobs murdered Black men, women, and children for dubious “offenses” such as resisting mistreatment as sharecroppers and speaking to White people without deference. Thousands of murders and countless attacks were ignored, encouraged, or carried out by local officials across the United States (Griffin 1995; Equal Justice Initiative 2015). Trauma and inequity pervaded day-to-day life for the Black men on the chain gang before they encountered its particular deprivation.

Alongside Jim Crow racism, poor Black people in the U.S. South, such as the men at the Roxboro State Prison, were confronting the mechanization of the exploitative agriculture industry. Agriculture remained the top industry in the South after slavery ended in 1865. It continued exploiting Black labor through a peonage system that kept landless farmers indebted and poor. In 1900, 40 percent of Black men in North Carolina worked in the industry (Ruggles et al. 2019). Although 22.3 percent of North Carolinian Black men still worked in agriculture by the 1950 census, only two men Rustin interviewed reported working on farms (Ruggles et al. 2019). By this time, the mechanization of farming drastically lowered the need for human labor. With fewer farm work opportunities, some Black working-class families left farms for cities and towns where systematic housing and labor discrimination awaited alongside racist policing (Sugrue 1996; Hirsch 1998; Muhammad 2010).

The Site of the Chain Gang

At the beginning of captivity, Rustin’s acclimation to the labor camp was spatially alienating and isolating: “About 2:00 p.m. I was ordered to prepare to leave for a prison camp, but the guard professed ignorance of my destination, and I still could not send my mother an address. As it turned out, more than a week would pass before I could get a letter off to her” (Rustin 1949, 1). In this instance, Rustin’s new situation is denied any form of external validation, such as an ability to relay information to family or the critical locational dimensions provided by addresses and postal services. He went on to board a small truck with a locked screen and carry on to what to him was an unknown location.

At the beginning of his twenty-two-day stay, Rustin learned from an inmate the severe lack of provisions for those imprisoned despite daily road work labor: “no comb, no brush, no toothbrush, no razor, no blades, no stamps, no writing paper, no pencils, nothing … all we gets for our week’s work is one bag of stud [tobacco].” Despite washing his allotted towel daily, Rustin’s bath towel took on a reddish-gray hue resembling the soil of Roxboro, North Carolina. He lamented having to keep the same towel for the entirety of his imprisonment. Daily road work, unchanged undergarments, and the confinement of a hundred men in one room created a palpably odorous sleeping quarter: “By Tuesday, the stench in the dormitory from sweating feet and encrusted underclothing was thick enough to cut.” Such inescapable conditions countered the official rulebook asserting that inmates “shall keep themselves physically and mentally fit; and personally neat and clean” (Rustin 1949, 3).

Given his arrest’s publicity, the prison captain took a particular interest in challenging Rustin’s “uppitiness,” a notably racist term used against Black men and women with wealth, prominence, or formal education. On the first day of road work, the captain singled out Rustin and struck a nearby imprisoned man as a show of unrestrained malice. Rustin (1949) recounted the scene:

“Now you git this here thing straight,” and he walked closer to me, his face quivering and the veins standing out in his neck. “You do what you’re told. You respect us or—.” He raised his hand threateningly, but instead of striking me, brought the back of his hand down across the mouth of the man on my left. (5)

In deplorable and bleak conditions, the imprisoned men in Rustin’s camp spent most of their waking hours toiling in remote ditches and on roads. As Rustin (1949) noted, the prisoners were objectified and strategically forbidden from the most basic human activity: “The guard-prisoner relationship and the conditions and regulations were such as to create in the men who ‘worked’ us the same attitude they had toward the tools we used” (27). Men were physically abused, faced with aimed guns, and threatened with mortal danger. If an imprisoned person could not work, they were sentenced to a particularly gruesome punishment—being hung vertically “on the bars”—which would lead to further incapacitation due to a swollen groin and legs. The penalty also caused mental distress as one man, Easy Life, recalled another inmate going “mad on the bars, so that he began to bang his head vigorously against [them]” (Rustin 1949, 8). In a nearby section of the report, Rustin recounted the maddeningly dehumanizing circumstance of the camp: “Skills among the men were few but what there was had no outlet. Over and again the walking boss would say, ‘Don’t try to think. Do what I tell ya to do’” (Rustin 1949, 26).

Despite strategies meant to dehumanize the prison laborers, a damning critique of the road arose via rhymes and songs. As with Delta Blues musicians degraded and subject to the threat of murder (Woods 1998, 25), the songs provided some means of criticizing the laborers’ racialized spatial predicament without instigating relatively excessive exposure to violence. Some lines were short and sharp, such as Purple reciting, “Man born of Black woman is horn to see Black days” (Rustin 1949, 7). Other verses were lengthy and melodic. Of the practice, Rustin said, “The poetry was almost always a description of life in the camp or the desire for women or of the ‘fear of time’” (Rustin 1949, 19).

The characterizations of the chain gang recounted by Rustin are multifaceted. Among discontent with food and sexual deprivation, the song and rhyme differentiate the road as a dire and familiar place:

I woulda told you

But I thought you knowed

Ain’t no heaven

On the county road.

These lines characterize the road as a place that bears collective meaning and experience—an undesirable site of racial violence—that speakers consider common knowledge collectively. The men describe a site void of redemption—“Ain’t no heaven.” In contrast to Christian work songs of the Southern region, the laborers’ regard for the road worksite allows for no promise of “heaven” or divine redemption (Berlin and Morgan 1993; Thompson 2014). On the road, the relentless iterations of racial capitalism are laid bare as the men physically labored, under force, to enshrine the plantation in a New South. Their lines name the setting regrettably familiar—“I woulda told you/But I thought you knowed.” The men’s sense of place on the road work site demands no real explanation. They quickly recognize its anti-Black animus and the role they are forced to play.

The rhyme quoted earlier is one that was targeted at men who complained about the work, and indeed it goes on to mark the apparent racial dichotomy:

Give dat white man

Sumpin’ of your time. (Rustin 1949, 20)

The lines mark the road as a site worked by the Black laborers for the satisfaction of an ambiguous White man. In this way, the Black laborers identify the purpose of the work—handing over time to assuage White patriarchal anxieties. To be sure, the work is wholly coercive, however, as another rhyme celebrates taking leave from the road work site:

Boys, git up, grab your pone …

This fool’s made it and

He’s headin’ home. (Rustin 1949, 14)

Altogether, the lines depict the road as an undesirable location comparable to a prisoner’s home set to be released. Because the road work setting was ever-changing as the convict laborers moved from site to site, it is not easy to think of it as a particular site. McKittrick and Woods (2007) argued in favor of looking beyond the dominant spatial classifications that might establish the road as something other than a unique setting, not because of its materiality but because of the human subjectivities that make it and maintain it. An alternative vision of the road—antagonistic rather than advancing—is collectively articulated, shared, and remembered through song and rhyme.

Although these songs may seem slight, their existence demands attention. For the convict laborers, fostering a collective sense of place was not meant to be spectacular or transform the material landscape. Such would have been dangerous. Instead, they coolly configured the abstract setting—the road—to represent a sort of antithesis to home or a disdainful place where one does not want to be. As simple and obvious as such collective regard for the road might seem, the laborers had little opportunity to reach such consciousness collectively—guards watched them even in their sleeping quarters, where men had to announce getting out of bed for any reason. Recounting the rule book, Rustin (1949) wrote, “No inmate may get out of bed after lights are dimmed without asking permission of the guard, and so all night long men were crying out to a guard many yards away: ‘Getting’ up, Cap’n,’ ‘Closing the window, Cap’n,’ ‘Goin’ to the toilet, Cap’n’” (3). In short, to have fostered a collective view any more outwardly than simple songs would have been met with repercussions. The creation and spread of their joint accounts “under the gun” of the prison guards subverts strategies of dehumanization.

Nonetheless, the laborers’ productions of the place were not without empirical discreteness. They did not only exist in metaphor. Instead, the laborers spoke of an authentic material landscape—the ever-present tough ground to work and the other material obstacles they faced on whichever worksite they toiled. In one of the songs Rustin recorded, the men said:

[s]ome to the right-a-ways—

some to the road.

The right-a-ways refer to the “cutting of trees, brushes, and shrubs which cover the ditches and new roadways” (Rustin 1949, 14). The lyrics melodically identify components of the physically displacing predicament—the sides and center of the setting. The particularity of these Black senses of place does not end at the right-a-ways, however. They encompass further boundaries, including the men’s homes and those of lovers, or comparative refuges away from the road.

As a site of confinement, the road itself was not productive of whatever sense of place emerged among the laborers. Instead, the road and its discursive and material displacing was the predicament to be overcome for establishing spatial collectivity. To do so, imprisoned laborers reflected on their shared dissatisfactions with immediate separation from loved ones. Indeed, the songs recorded by Rustin and Jackson took on particular meaning in what were meant to be gender-homogenous prison camps. As in the song “Rosie,” recorded in a prison work camp in the 1940s by Alan Lomax, longing for the attention of a distant lover is a common trope. “Julie” highlights the anxiety of such hope in captivity and being compelled to escape:

Better get the sergeant

My feet is getting itchy

Got to see my Julie.

Such verses represent incarceration underlying an anxious discomfort in the heterosexual matrix (Butler 1999). The singer longs for correction—overcoming the distance and gaining heteronormative proximity to family and lovers. Indeed, longing might be the most dominant theme of the songs. The alienation produced by the camp is made specific. In turn, the singers focus their critique of imprisonment—incarceration is undesirable due to separation from Julie and the racialized violence of captivity.

Other songs, like “Jody,” also stem from longing for a lover, with the lyrics stating: “Ain’t no need of writing home/Jody got your girl and gone.” Such lyrics represent love lost during incarceration and the futile attempts to maintain contact. It, too, presents the centrality of romantic love to what home means. A lost lover entirely dismisses the utility of writing home. The same song, “Jody,” highlights the same theme: a desire for home as a site of heterosexual romance: “First thing I’ll do when I get home/Call my woman on the telephone” (Jackson 1972). Indeed, as focused on in this article, the lyrics and melodies of the chain gang songs, like “Hammer Ring,” also reflect the often remote, distant conditions of prison camp life.¹

Genealogy of Songs

Only Black inmates are noted for producing the songs across U.S. prisons. On the chain gangs, a man or woman would start a verse and lead several other inmates in call-and-response while laboring. Song leaders were typically experienced imprisoned laborers rather than skillful singers. An instance of singing, then, reflected memories of anti-Black exploitation. The work songs considered in this article are uniquely African American. Folklorist Bruce Jackson visited a Texas prison to record the songs sung there and reported the following:

White and Latin-American inmates (about 70 percent of the convicts) do not sing these songs, nor do they have any body of metrically functional songs of their own used similarly. The songs and the style of utilizing them are exclusively the property of Black inmates, and they are clearly in a tradition going back beyond the importation of the first Negro slaves to the Virginia Colony in 1631. (Jackson 1972, xix).

The plantation and then the prison camps advanced inhumane transgressions against Blackness, which epoched the emergence of the collective consciousness of such conditions. This grammar/epistemology/framework manifested through Black creativity like the work songs and the blues. The songs named them.

Fostering such a creative framework on the chain gang demanded that the immediately threatening and alienating road work site accommodate the production of Black spatial collectivity. Indeed, as Black laborers were held on the road, the infrastructures were regarded as mere technological entities, and as Rustin noted, the men themselves were to behave as work tools or risk harm. The road thus becomes a singular named the place where White men are “given time” and lovers like Julie are far away.

The songs both reckon with and create something more than what is offered by the material conditions of captivity—an archive of interracial transgressions and collective desires for romantic contact and more. Altogether, these activities of the songs—reckoning and creating—implicate place in fluctuating captivity. Indeed, for its part, the often deadly nature of the convict road work and its remoteness provoked alterity. Exposed to the harsh sun and Southern humidity, the flesh of the imprisoned laborers perhaps predicated subjective experiences of these conditions as being offshoots of plantation violence.

Conclusion

Whereas the planners used political rhetoric and propaganda, the laborers used songs set against the slamming of heavy work tools to lament their predicament and subversively criticize the production of modern roads. I determine how the songs themselves are cultural matters that delineate the moving road work site as one of deprivation echoing the Southern plantation. The article also attempts to highlight a linkage between the racialized presence of the laborers and the Good Roads’ fruition.

For geographic work, the initial analysis urges further attention to the racially violent animus of modern development. Significant literature investigates anti-Blackness as a constitutive element of capital and development (e.g., Wilson 2000; Gilmore 2002; Bledsoe and Wright 2019). Following this analysis and recent disciplinary interest in racial capitalism (Vasudevan and Smith 2020; Al-Bulushi 2022; Bledsoe, McCreary, and Wright 2022; Neely and Lopez 2022), future work might better consider racial violence as coeval with capitalist expansion. Indeed, the union of capitalist development with state work might hinge on the ability of such development to secure racial domination (Robinson 2020). As historical material, the laborers’ songs are unique for contemporarily identifying the anti-Blackness of modern road development or one critical feature of America’s postemancipation renewal. Perhaps what is most interesting is the songs stripping away the accumulation-enabling embellishments of modern roads to foreground core anti-Black experiences of visceral alienation.

Ultimately, this analysis aims to show how the Progressive planners’ technocratic configuring of the road and the subsequent fluctuating conditions of such a site for its laborers failed to entirely stymie its immediate cultural production as a singular place of anti-Blackness. Rustin and the other laborers’ narratives and songs negotiate the otherwise alienating roadway. Their sense of place is dependent not on the qualities of the road as a site of mobility per se but rather one of, paradoxically speaking, dynamic stasis along with their subjective experience of the setting as being socially isolating and distinctly racialized. Although it is true the laborers would move from site to site during road construction, what is also true is that the songs would often remain the same—with undeterred reference to the deadly site of the road.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Darius Scott

DARIUS SCOTT is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 2K6, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include oral history, sexual stigma, and Black geographies.

Notes

1 “Julie” and “Jody” are recorded in Jackson’s (1972) Wake Up Dead Man. Although Jackson recorded these songs in 1960s Texas prison camps that were not for road construction, they reflect the encompassing genre.