Slavery by Another Name: Texas Convict Leasing, the Wilmington Coup and Nat Turner

Three Novembers, One System

Slavery did not end in one clean break. It was resisted, defended and then rebuilt in new forms. Three November dates on the Equal Justice Initiative's calendar trace that arc.

Nat Turner, 1831

On November 11, 1831, Nat Turner was hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia. In August he had led the most significant slave rebellion in U.S. history, in which some 55 to 60 white people were killed. The white response was savage: militias and mobs killed scores of Black people, many with no connection to the revolt. Virginia and other Southern states then tightened their slave codes, banned teaching enslaved people to read, and restricted Black preachers. Turner's rebellion showed that enslaved people would fight; the backlash showed how far slaveholders would go to stop them.

Texas Convict Leasing, 1866

A year after emancipation, Texas lawmakers authorized the leasing of convicts to private employers. Paired with Black Codes that criminalized vagrancy and "idleness," the system funneled freed people into prison and then back into the fields. Leased convicts worked plantations, railroads and mines under brutal conditions, and death rates were staggering. The Thirteenth Amendment's exception, allowing involuntary servitude "as a punishment for crime," made it legal.

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The Wilmington Coup, 1898

In 1898, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city, with a Black majority and an interracial Fusion government. On November 10, two days after an election marked by Red Shirt intimidation, an armed white mob of some 2,000 men burned the office of Alex Manly's Black-owned Daily Record, killed Black residents (a 2006 state commission estimated as many as 60), and forced the elected officials to resign at gunpoint. Coup leader Alfred Moore Waddell was installed as mayor the same day. It remains the only successful coup d'état on American soil, and it opened the door to disfranchisement across the state.

The Thread

Turner fought slavery directly. Texas rebuilt it through prisons. Wilmington destroyed Black political power by force. Read together, they show that the struggle over Black freedom was never settled by a single law or a single war.