Speaker 1: For now, it's time to move on to the Way
Speaker 1: Black History Fact. Today's Way Black History Fact is sponsored
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Speaker 1: And while we're now a few days into the new year,
Speaker 1: it's important to kind of commemorate this with a story.
Speaker 1: We couldn't get it in before the end of last
Speaker 1: year just because it didn't time out that way. But
Speaker 1: I'm gonna share a bit with you from Black History Unlocked.
Speaker 1: Go ahead and give them a follow up here on Instagram,
Speaker 1: or you can go to their website too if you're
Speaker 1: not but Black History Unlocked. In the years before the
Speaker 1: Civil War, the first day of the New Year was
Speaker 1: often a heartbreaking one for enslaved people in the United
Speaker 1: States and the African American community. New Year's Day used
Speaker 1: to be widely known as hiring Day or heartbreak Day,
Speaker 1: as the African American abolitionist journalist William Cooper Neil described it,
Speaker 1: because enslaved people spent New Year's Eve waiting wondering if
Speaker 1: their owners were going to rent them out to someone else,
Speaker 1: thus potentially splitting up their families. The renting out of
Speaker 1: slave labor was a relatively common practice in the Antebellum
Speaker 1: South and a profitable practice for white slave owners and hirers.
Speaker 1: Hiring Day was part of the larger economic cycle in
Speaker 1: which most debts were collected and settled on New Year's Day,
Speaker 1: says Alexis mccrossen, an expert on the history of New
Speaker 1: Year's Eve and New Year's Day and a professor of
Speaker 1: history at Southern Methodist University who writes about hiring Day
Speaker 1: in her forthcoming book Times Touchdown the New Year in
Speaker 1: American life. Some enslaved people were put up for auction
Speaker 1: that day, or held under contracts that started in January.
Speaker 1: These transactions also took place all year long, and contracts
Speaker 1: could last for different amounts of time. These deals were
Speaker 1: conducted privately among family's friends and business contacts, and slaves
Speaker 1: were handed over in town squares, on court house steps,
Speaker 1: and sometimes simply on the side of the road. According
Speaker 1: to Divided Mastery, Slave Hiring in the American South by
Speaker 1: Jonathan D. Martin. If you want to learn more about this,
Speaker 1: you can check out Time dot Com and America's Black Museum.
Speaker 1: But I think that this illuminates something that a lot
Speaker 1: of people lose sight of in one it's that, you know,
Speaker 1: for people that have this position, well, you know, my
Speaker 1: family never owned slaves, and slaves are only owned by
Speaker 1: rich people, and so I'm not responsible for the condition
Speaker 1: that black people are in. It's not my problem to
Speaker 1: fix that sort of attitude, which is prevalent, particularly in
Speaker 1: horror conservative circles. You know, the people that don't feel
Speaker 1: like they came from money and are not fully are
Speaker 1: taking in the American dream. I think that this illuminates
Speaker 1: a very important fact, which is that you didn't have
Speaker 1: to own slaves to benefit from slavery.
Speaker 2: It's just like you don't have to be a racist
Speaker 2: person or a white supremacist to benefit from the system.
Speaker 2: Excellent that that are the tenets of those practices.
Speaker 1: Yes, and then another thing that's worth mentioning is that
Speaker 1: slavery was not just slavery like in the traditional sense.
Speaker 1: It was also practices like these. There was an infinite
Speaker 1: number of ways that you could deploy your slaves, and
Speaker 1: people did that everything from slave labor like you would
Speaker 1: think cotton fields, to you know, scientific experiments, to rentals
Speaker 1: to perverse sexual stuff, on and on and on and
Speaker 1: it's important you notice