Binghamton, Slavery, and the Unfinished Business of Juneteenth

This week we celebrate Juneteenth, with our attention directed to Texas where the end of chattel slavery came two years after the end of the Civil War.  Locally, the Black community hosts celebrations of the belated coming of freedom and the ongoing struggle for justice—as demonstrated by the popular renaming of Columbus Park as the Assata Shakur Park.

Local media, scholars, and elected officials with hardly an exception invariably cast Juneteenth as a fight won in a distant time and place. Little is said or recorded about the two centuries of slavery in New York State.  It goes unmentioned that Binghamton was founded by a white man who brought slavery to the region. Or that his benefactor, after whom the town was named, became fabulously rich, far wealthier than even plantation-owning founding fathers, by capturing and selling persons into slavery. No one dares mention that both Joshua Whitney and William Bingham supported and expanded slavery, and were attended daily by enslaved persons. There are a multitude of hidden histories here (for a brief suggestion see a previous post here).  

Given this, it is thus unremarkable that the only two statues surrounding Binghamton’s historic city hall represent white men complicit in slavery: Senator Dickinson, who prior to the Civil War was a staunch defender of the enslavement rights of Southern States, and a man whose statues have been torn down elsewhere for his role in intercontinental conquest and enslavement, Christopher Columbus.

Commemorating Enslavers on Campus

Absent such historical knowledge, the commemoration of enslavers goes unchallenged. Such are the fruits of living, willful amnesia:  every day Black students at SUNY-Binghamton head into classrooms and new dormitories named after persons who may have captured, bought, sold, or owned their ancestors:  Joshua Whitney and William Bingham.

Gardening with Forced Labor Today

Casting Juneteenth as sealing up the moral faults of the nation also makes it impossible to pursue the unfinished business of the unilateral declaration of independence of 1776 and the 1787 United States Constitution.  For as readers of the constitution should know, the Thirteenth amendment ratified in 1865 did not fully abolish slavery—it explicitly legalized slavery for those convicted of a crime, a clause immediately turned against Black people in the post-Civil War era. It also provided a critical foundation for the rise of mass incarceration in the last three decades.

Millions of persons, predominantly of color, have found themselves in prisons, impressed into forced labor, often to earn pocket change to buy basic hygiene necessities and food.  When paid, the wages are pitiful, ranging from 10 to 60 cents per hour.

Broome County, like a handful of states, doesn’t even pay a penny an hour.  As incarcerated residents have long discovered—and one should remember that Broome County regularly has the highest jail incarceration rate of all 62 counties in the state—if you don’t work in the jail, you get sent to solitary and lose privileges.

Who benefits? Forced local jail labor has long been used to clean and groom, free of charge, county and private facilities, roads, cemeteries, and church lawns. And the money to buy commercial lawnmowers, landscaping supplies, and the like? It came from the profits the Sheriff has skimmed off vastly overpriced commissary goods and telephone calls.

As part of the effort to legitimize and modernize mass incarceration, farming has now been added to the list of jobs for unpaid, incarcerated labor.  Broome County’s new Sheriff Akshar has trumpeted setting up a new garden inside the jail, constructed with the assistance of Cornell Cooperative Extension, a local union, and the Broome County Council of Churches. Who could be against gardening? As WBNG TV reports here, the garden is supposed to teach the incarcerated employable skills, although what those skills are and who might employ them is left unsaid.  WIVT TV tells us all the veggies grown there will be sent to Broome County Council of Churches’ food pantry, CHOW. It isn’t clear why they aren’t used in the jail, where the lack of food has long been an issue; people can linger for months and even years awaiting trial without ever seeing a piece of fruit, even the cheapest canned fruit cocktail. No one mentions the history and practice of forced labor, and the constitutional clauses that endorse incarcerated slavery.

Incarcerated Labor fights back

It is getting harder to keep such practices invisible, for across the country incarcerated men and women have been protesting forced incarcerated labor, hunger, and abuse. In 2016 a national prison labor strike mobilized under the call of a “Call to Action Against Slavery in America.” In 2018 incarcerated workers launched a national prison labor strike over forced and abusive and labor, arguing they were treated like animals, “a systematic problem born out of slavery.”  Last October incarcerated works across Alabama launched yet another strike.  

The incarcerated in Broome County jail have done the same, conducting their own ad hoc hunger strikes. Lacking any oversight and access by the public, such appeals do not reach beyond family and friends, and are most often silenced by retaliation against those who dare even try to file a grievance.

Juneteenth Lives

And so, what does Juneteenth mean to us in Binghamton in 2023?  We celebrate surely the end of chattel slavery, and not only in the South and Texas.  But Juneteenth is a call to much more: a revelation and reaffirmation of the living, daily struggle for racial justice in Binghamton, New York State, and the nation. To be faithful to those who have fought for freedom is to continue their work, to ally with those pursuing liberation—and there is much to be done.