This post is about a sensitive topic. Some of the images may be offensive. If you are easily offended don’t complain, just don’t look. If you prefer to live with your head in the sand about this, I hope this will be considered a kick to that part of your anatomy that is currently most prominent.

There are millions of people in the world who have been victimized by various types of human trafficking. Worldwide in places like India, Thailand, and Africa, people, many of them children, are sold into labor to pay off parental debt. Others are kidnapped and sold for domestic “help,” or lured, with promises of a better life, into the global sex trade. The sex trade globally is second only to the arms trade and drug trade as the most lucrative forms of human economic endeavors. Regrettably, the United States is a large player in this assault against humanity.

According to author Justin Holcomb:

Human trafficking is modern-day slavery and the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world. It is the recruitment, transportation, harboring, or taking of people by means of threat, force, coercion, abduction, fraud, or deception for the purpose of exploiting them.

The United Nations estimates that 2.5 million people are trafficked annually. The U.S. State Department estimates an even higher number: about 12.3 million adults and children “in forced labor, bonded labor, and forced prostitution around the world.” It deprives people of their human rights and freedoms, it is a global health risk, and it fuels organized crime. Victims of trafficking are forced or coerced into labor or sexual exploitation. Sex trafficking is one of the most profitable forms of trafficking and involves many kinds of sexual exploitation, such as prostitution, pornography, bride trafficking, and the commercial sexual abuse of children. According to the United Nations, sex trafficking brings in an estimated $32 billion a year worldwide. In the U.S., sex trafficking brings in $9.5 billion annually.

Women and children brought into the U.S. are routinely trafficked into strip clubs, brothels, massage parlors and servitude. Their pimps come in all shapes, sizes and colors, as do their abusers.

Unknown to many and unacknowledged by others is that fact that major sporting events like the Super Bowl draw those who traffick women and children for sex. Although the numbers of people involved is debated (see this article, for example) the reality of the issue is not.

I recently was able to do an email interview Justin Holcomb and Nick Laparra who co-operate the Twitter account “Don’t Buy Girls” about this very issue.

MD: 1. Why is the Super Bowl such an important night for those seeking to stop trafficking?

JH & NL: The Super Bowl is the most-watched program on TV every year. But many people don’t know about its dark underside: the Super Bowl, like other large sporting events, is a magnet for sex trafficking and child prostitution. Large sporting events like the Super Bowl are prime targets for sex traffickers because of the high demand generated by thousands of men pouring into an area for a weekend of fun.

The 2010 Super Bowl saw an estimated 10,000 sex workers brought into Miami. Despite efforts to crack down on sex trafficking at the 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas, there was still a tremendous number of women and children sexually exploited. In the past, attempted crackdowns by law enforcement have backfired by treating prostitutes as criminals to be locked up rather than victims to be rescued, but new efforts are gaining traction: a bill moving through the Indiana legislature aims to toughen the State’s sex trafficking laws before the Super Bowl.

MD: 2. Do you know of any organized church or ministry efforts to rescue girls Sunday night?

JH & NL: Yes. Theresa Flores, a former human trafficking victim and founder of Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution (S.O.A.P.), is there this weekend with members of several Dayton, OH churches. They put the human trafficking hotline number on several thousand bars of soap. The hope is that victims will see the bars of soap in their hotel rooms and call the number.

The following example is not a church or ministry but it is also great that Indianapolis cab drivers are being trained to spot prostitutes and pimps in their cars.

MD: 3. Is there any evidence of increased law enforcement awareness in Indianapolis of this problem?

JH & NL: Governor Mitch Daniels signed a bill a few days ago that increases the penalty for forcing an underage person into the sex trade to up to 50 years in prison. Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller said in a statement, “Though it is an honor for Indiana to host the Super Bowl, many sincere voices have brought to light the fact that human trafficking is a shameful practice we can’t ignore. With the Governor’s signature, law enforcement and prosecutors will have a new legal tool to combat this problem.”

The FBI and local authorities have already made two human trafficking related arrests in Indianapolis. Two women, ages 21 and 19, were taken into custody on 2/2. Both were forced into prostitution when they were 16 years old.

MD: 4. Who are the people doing the buying? Super Bowl ticket holders?

JH & NL: With over 100,000 football fans descending on Indianapolis for the weekend, we presume most, if not all, of the offenders will be Super Bowl attenders.

MD: 5. To your knowledge has the NFL ever addressed this like it did breast cancer awareness?

JH & NL: To the best of our knowledge, no they haven’t.

MD: 6. To your knowledge have any NFL players spoken out on the trafficking issue?

JH & NL: According to thestatefilehouse.com, “Jeff Saturday and Tarrick Glenn (a present and a former Indianapolis Colts player, respectively) have teamed up with Indiana Attorney General Gregg Zoeller to make a stand against human trafficking in Indiana. Zoeller has made it his goal to raise awareness and discourage the sexual exploitation of young women. Saturday and Glenn joined Zoeller on Thursday to announce the “Take the Pledge” initiative. The goal of the project is to encourage men to make a stand and stop the sex trade.”

This is good news! We hope people will listen. We also hope men will take a stand to not participate in this tragedy we call human trafficking.

You can follow “Don’t Buy Girls” on Twitter and like them on Facebook.

I for one would like to see the National Football League take a more pronounced stand against this. Wouldn’t it be amazing to see an anti-sex trafficking logo on all uniforms in the Super Bowl in 2013 just like we saw pink shoes and ribbons on all uniforms in October? As this sinful crime against humanity makes a profit simply by virtue of the Super Bowl being played the NFL should be loud and consistent in speaking against it. I am under no illusion that the NFL supports sex trafficking, but the players and owners should be using the platform of the most watched event in the world to oppose it. What say ye, NFL?

Below are several more images you can use to help remember the sex trafficking issue this weekend and beyond. Put them on your blog, make one your Twitter avatar, or your profile pic on Facebook. Following the pics are links to books relevant to this subject.

Take. A. Stand.

A couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to a newly unveiled savings site called Moolala. In the pattern of Groupon, Moolala seeks to bring together buyers and sellers, creating savings for the first group and power of scale for the second. In those cases it’s a win/win for both groups.

The primary reason that I gave this any listen at all is that my friend is not the type to jump on bandwagons or promote silly, useless ideas. I knew that he would not contact me (and others about something that had no merit.

In less than one month, Moolala has thousands of people signed up for their email daily deals (which are approaching launch date). Their marketing strategy has been to unleash the power of social networking to get the word out about Moolala, then launch the deals. Rather than having deals in one city, with word of mouth advertising, Moolala is launching in many cities leveraging the power of Facebook, Twitter and email to spread the word.

Another distinction between Moolala and other sites is a reward program that actually pays based on the number of people recruited and number of items sold. In practical terms it means that participants get 2% of what is sold from their friends, their friends’ friends, their friends’ friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends’ friends. As you can see, while a 2% commission does not sound like much, when 500 people in your group make the same purchase, it can add up. Not only does the power of scale work for the seller, it works for the “salesperson,” too.

Moolala co-founder Jon Dale was kind enough to participate in this email interview over the weekend.

martyduren.com: Jon, can you give an overview of how Moolala was birthed?
JD: In September 2010, my brother Matt approached me with an amazing idea and asked me to join him in working on an exciting new project with an incredible team. He wanted to create an opportunity for people to invest their social capital and see both social and financial rewards. I think we’ve done exactly that.

martyduren.com: How did you hit upon the idea of social networking as your “buzz
builder”?
JD: It was very deliberate from the outset. We designed Moolala to combine the hottest space on the web (Daily Deals) with the most powerful marketing force ever (word of mouth). Rather than spending millions of dollars on traditional marketing and advertising, we’ve designed a system that rewards our users really well when they do the marketing for us.

We launched on Wednesday, December 29, and the response has absolutely blown us away.

martyduren.com: Can you describe the upcoming deals?
JD: All I can say at this time is that you will love them, and they will be similar to the deals on the two largest deal sites. [Jon will not speculate publicly on the timing of the deals launch.]

martyduren.com: You’ve mentioned before the idea of win/win/win. Can you elaborate on that a little?
JD: You hear a lot of people talk about win/win. We’re trying to take it a step further. We think its important for all our stakeholders (members, businesses & employees) to win as often as possible. We love that the businesses we work with will get lots of new customers, but they can also be part of the network and refer people as well. Our members win because they get great deals and they can earn great rewards. And we’re building a team of employees who love what they do every day and as they help businesses and our members win we’ll find ways to reward them as well.

martyduren.com: You seem to take customer service very seriously. Why is that? Can’t you just get by with offering great deals?
JD: We’ve been very inspired by what we’ve seen companies like Zappos do. We believe we have an opportunity to amaze our customers with every interaction they have with us. This provides multiple opportunities for wins. First, it’s a lot more fun for our Member Experience team because they get to spend their day amazing and surprising people. And second, every time we amaze a member, they share the story and that results in more members (and as an added bonus, when this happens our members win too).

martyduren.com: What do you hope people get from Moolala?
JD: Great deals, great rewards, and an amazing experience that they share
with their friends.

martyduren.com: Where do you hope to see Moolala in a year? In five years?
JD: Big…and then really big :^)

When you sign up for Moolala’s daily deals, you will be assigned a personalize link which keeps track of all the people who sign up under you through four levels (five counting yourself). Click on my link: http://share.moolala.com/r/3JFETW1 to explore the opportunity, and to sign up. Be sure to use my link so I get credit.

This is the last part of my interview with Travesty in Haiti: A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking author, Dr. Tim Schwartz. (You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.)

I am extremely grateful to Dr. Schwartz for his time and his thorough responses. If you have not yet ordered Travesty I encourage you to do so through either of the links in the article.

MD: Elaborate on the trouble that you had getting your book published; what were some of the excuses, if any, given to you?

Schwartz: You’ve read published authors giving advice to aspiring writers, “Don’t give up, when I was getting started I tried twenty publishers before I finally got accepted.”

Well none of them have anything on me.

The process started off well enough. After about 20 queries to agents I got one, a good one, and she said it was a terrific book. She subsequently queried every major US publisher–I think there were thirty. Not a single one would even look at the manuscript.

So I took over and began approaching academic presses. I went through every one I could find. More than twenty. I think that two read it. The senior editor at one of them, Zed Books in England, he liked the book, wrote me a letter of congratulations and said that they were sure to publish it, but that it had to go out for review. Presses move slowly. It was one year later when it went out. In the meantime the first editor retired. The new editor never read the book but sent it out for review. The reviewer sent it back saying something to the effect, “He keeps saying that aid is ineffective but he never gives us any evidence.” I think that anyone who has read the book would be as befuddled as me by that comment. The one thing I know that I did was hammer away at the evidence. I think the editor misspoke. I think that for Zed the point was that it was not academic enough and at the time it wasn’t. I had taken out the more academic parts because I was trying to reach as wide an audience as possible. So I put them back in, but Zed wouldn’t give me another chance.

Also, there was another problem with the book, one identified by the first Zed editor: it doesn’t fit into any genre.

So anyway, I kept trying, for years. I don’t think there is any publisher or agent out there that I did not approach. No one ever read it again. In the meantime I actually added stuff. I couldn’t leave it alone.

When I was back to Haiti in 2007 on a rural marketing analysis, I updated all that had happened to the people who were in the book. And what had happened was so unsettling–like the orphanage owner who we had all known for decades and he had been lording over the orphans, beating them, having sex them…with no one holding him accountable. It gave me new inspiration.

In the end what I did was publish it on Booksurge. This is a company owned by Amazon, it’s inexpensive (I think I paid $190). That way I could get the book off my desk, didn’t have to think about it anymore. If anyone ever was interested they would be able to find it. It would be out there.

But I also did something else. I bought 50 of the books myself and mailed them to every big shot development player I could think of. Sacks, Easterly… I doubt many of them read it. But an exception was Paul Farmer. And that began to change things for both me and the book.

Paul bought multiple copies and passed them out to people in the US State Department, including Cheryl Mills–Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff. They actually contacted me, told me that it was terrific book and that they were trying to change US policies toward Haiti. That was a great moment for me. To have experienced so much rejection and then have the people who were most in a position to determine Haiti’s fate contact me. It made it all worthwhile. Farmer himself later wrote me and I went and met him. And that was another great moment because Paul Farmer is one of my heroes. I had always kind of feared his opinion of the book; what he would say if he read it? Would he be offended, see it as an attack on charity? And now, for him to have read it and for him to write and say, “I am your biggest fan,” well, I felt like one of those schmucks on a game show, like I wanted to jump up and down. It was a big thing for me.

MD: Did you suffer any repercussions from publishing Travesty?

Schwartz: Not yet. At least not from the NGOs or USAID. Guys at USAID generally enjoyed it. Some of them are a little defensive. It does not take much effort for them to imagine me writing about them. It is kind of funny at times. Since the change in political climate I have been getting back involved in Haiti and on more than one occasion otherwise friends have turned to me and said, “Don’t you dare write about me.”

But again, I want to emphasize, it is not the people in USAID or the NGOs. These guys are ultimately on the side of the people who need the aid. These guys are former activists and ex-peace corps workers. A heck of a lot of them have a spouse from underdeveloped countries and not from the elite in these countries. If you sit down with these folks almost every single one of them will tell you the same things that I am saying. They just don’t want to do on the record because they have salaries, pension plans, wives and husbands and children.

The problem lies in the system.

I don’t know if it was/is intentional or not, but it reminds me of what happened next door to Haiti in the Dominican Republic. Back in the 60s and 70s the Dominicans—with probable guidance from the CIA—dealt with their domestic communists by giving them scholarships, research grants, and jobs in NGOs and Universities. This worked better than killing them and making others upset. Once they were on the payroll they had to quiet down or they would lose their means of subsistence. And as they got married and had children, well they had to conform. What are you going to do?

It is the system we need to change. The way it is now, the system is shutting up the very people who would change it.

On another level, yes, I have suffered repercussions, on a personal level. And I continue to suffer them.

MD: Are you still in contact with people from the Hamlet? Has anything changed for them since the book was published?

Schwartz: One of the girls I talk about in the book, one I semi-adopted, she is from the Hamlet originally and now she is going to college in the Dominican Republic. She came and stayed with me for a while.

I have another guy, he is in the book. He sometimes works for me when I do surveys in the private sector.

And every now and then someone from the Hamlet calls me and I get word of how things are going.

I also visited in 2007. Nothing had changed. It was exactly the same. Except a lot of the adults had died. The new adults, those in positions of economic power, the mothers and fathers who lorded over their lakou, they were teenagers and even children when I was living there. The men had been my diving buddies and the girls that I would buy dolls and scarves for when I was away, now they were running the show. It was an interesting feeling. We spent a lot of time reminiscing.

I should add that it’s an incredibly dynamic place. Despite what I just said, only a small nucleus of people remain there. It doesn’t seem to change because children are being born all the time the population growth is high. So the number of people seems to stay the same. But most children, 50% or more, by the time they are 8 years old, they are gone, either dead or shipped off to family in Port-au-Prince. Adults get to Miami, Bahamas or the Dominican Republic, or they marry and go live in the Village or in Baie-de-Sol. When you go there, it’s the same place, but many different faces and new children.

Books you purchase through these links are priced the same as going directly through Amazon.com and helps to support martyduren.com through sales commissions.

Two Haitian boys outside Port-au-Prince, February 2010. Photo: Marty Duren

Travesty in Haiti: A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking

MD: Is there a solution to what seems to be the logistics issues that came to the fore after the earthquake?

Schwartz: Yes. And I am not the only one. There is a growing sentiment–as per Easterly and a less well know but equally astute guy named Owen Barder at the Center for Global Development–that we need accountability.

Just as every other sector of the business community, school, church, the government, the NGO sector needs transparency, accountability, and feedback.

That is not hard to implement and it would solve the problems of ineffective aid, cheating, embezzling, lying about the effectiveness of programs. Ultimately it would give way to the coordination of aid agencies, the deficiency of which was fantastically apparent in the miserable disorder that accompanied the earthquake relief.

I was unofficially working on this with Paul Farmer and the Special Envoy’s Office but it got canned in December. The explanation they gave me was that they had decided that it was the Haitian government’s responsibility to monitor the NGOs.

What I envisioned was a type of Standard and Poor’s of NGOs but with exceptional rigor. The fulcrum would be a small office with maybe six employees–young, hungry, idealistic and fit students of development. We would have an Internet site that listed all the NGOs in Haiti (no one knows how many are out there). On the website we would have the financial data, like Charity Navigator, but we would carry it further, as does the BBB’s charity evaluations. We would publish salaries and percentage of money spent on overhead and we would rate the organization on their disposition to provide us with data.

Then we would go out and actually verify this, rate them on the accuracy report on field programs and if whether or not they were doing what they say they are doing. Right there you would expose a lot of bogus organizations and by making that information public donors could avoid throwing their money away.

But we would take it even further.

We would provide a small but representative and rigorously obtained sample of the opinions of the recipients of the aid. No one ever does that. The NGOs are supposed to do it. It’s in all the charters and stipulations for aid packages so what they do is send some paid consultant out, or one of their own employees, and they write up a report. You can imagine how that goes. As William Easterly said, “If I allowed my students to assign their own grades most would not study very hard.” All this would go into a rating system, made public, on the website, and updated bi-annually. There would also be rating open to reviewers, like the Amazon.com reviews.

It all seems so simple and so logical. I am not saying anything that an 8th grade student taking his first business class wouldn’t think of.

Why don’t they do it? That’s a different question.

This system would also allow us to easily maintain a database of all the resources at the disposal of each NGO. Such a resource, indeed this accountability structure, could serve as a institution for coordination in the event of disaster. The single greatest problem with the earthquake was a total absence of coordination. It was absolutely mind boggling.

MD: What percentage of the orphanages in Haiti are being run legitimately, being that there are actual children without parents with outside donations going to their clothing, room or board and where the state of the children is bettered by living there?

Schwartz: In my honest opinion? This could get me in trouble.

I suspect none; but there are very good reasons for this. And since you asked, here is a rather lengthy excerpt from an unpublished article I just wrote:

There are simply not enough orphans–at least not enough to satisfy the aid agencies. There are those orphanage keepers who drive around before the scheduled arrival of overseas sponsors and round up street children to serve as temporary orphans (as a rule street children prefer to be free); but most orphanages provide children with access to education in exchange for fulfilling the role as “orphan” (I detail these finds in the book Travesty in Haiti).

For Haitians, it is not a big surprise that orphans are scarce. In a USAID funded report that I wrote at the time of the research mentioned above I explained why. First of all, Haitians have large families. The average Haitian in the region where I worked had 10 full and half brothers and sisters; 20 uncles and aunts (including parent’s half siblings); about 35 first cousins (reducing the average lifetime total by a factor of 4); a maximum of 12 living grandparents (4 grandparents and 8 great grandparents); and a possible 40 great uncles and aunts (the siblings and half siblings of his or her grandparents). In addition to these blood relatives, a Haitian child has two fictive mothers and two fictive fathers (godparents). Any one of these relatives may be disposed, even eager, to adopt the child, especially in lieu of the labor value of children, the second reason why true orphans are scarce.

Haitians–at least 65% of whom practice household livelihood strategies involving labor intensive agriculture, livestock and petty commodity production–place a high value on children for the labor they provide in the household survival strategies. This is nothing new to agricultural or pre-industrial societies. Children in early America were also valued for their labor. Pre-industrial subsistence strategies mean intense labor regimes, specifically fetching firewood and water, running errands, washing cloths and cooking. For example, just fetching water in the Northwest Department involves a 70 minute round-trip walk to the nearest spring. Children perform these tasks and in doing so free adults to pursue more gainful opportunities, such as marketing, agriculture, livestock rearing, migrant wage labor and, for women, employment as adult domestics for wealthy families in Port-au-Prince.

I captured this labor value of children in a statistically representative and random study I made of farmers’ (68 men and 68 women) opinions in rural Haiti. Common were statements such as,

If you don’t have children, dogs will eat you. If you have no children to fetch a little water and get some fire for you. If you hurt something or you are sick, you’re finished. (fifty-five-year-old father of seventeen)

You need children to help you work. It is children who save the household (thirty-two-year-old mother of five)

Children don’t tire. Children are animals. Children are never worn out. They do all the work. They go to the water. They do all the work. (forty-year-old mother of four)

I cannot live without children. . . . If I need one to go to the village, I send him. If I need one to go for wood, I send him. They can’t tell me no . . . . Not one of them can stand in front of me and say no. We pull together. (thirty-nine-year-old father of six)

The same trends have been documented by the few scholars who have studied Haitian urban livelihood strategies and child household labor contributions (Maynard-Tucker 1996). Children are so valuable in this respect that many of what the typical Westerner sees as impoverished Haitians are, in reality, people eagerly seeking to care for child relatives. A child is often sent to live with an elder family member to perform necessary household tasks. In exchange for a child’s services there is the expectation that the child’s guardian will pay for his or her education.

So why do they ‘give them away’ to strangers, as we keep seeing in the press? There is a generally accepted principal of social mobility in Haiti: If someone has an opportunity to better one’s conditions, education, or income, then others have a duty to allow them to do so. That’s on the Haitian side, and that’s the pivotal point of the struggle for control of Haiti’s children, the point on which aid agencies–all of them based in post industrial developed countries and dedicated/funded to protect children and defend the rights of children–find fertile ground.

In the competition between aid agencies and Haitian families the aid agencies must, if they want to get orphans–whether these orphans have parents or not–make what can be construed as a competitive bid: they offer education. And offer they do. The love and need most Haitians have for children is sometimes overcome with the desire to take advantage of educational opportunities provided by foreigners, aid agencies, and so-called orphanages; opportunities that even moderately well-to-do relatives often cannot match. This tendency is manifest in the recent arrest of ten missionaries where the children and parents explained that they thought their children were going to the neighboring Dominican Republic where they would get an education.

But the Haitians are emphatically not “giving them up”; rather they are giving them an opportunity–not to allow the parents to see the child again is, to the average Haitian, a criminal act. And it is here that we arrive at the issue of child slavery for [in] it is buried scarcity of orphans can be discovered the reason why aid seekers and humanitarian agencies, such as UNICEF, shifted focus from orphans to child slaves, a trend that, as will be seen, the press followed with gusto.

Child Slavery

The first rumblings of child slavery in Haiti came with the 1984 and 1990 Conferences on Child Domesticity held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Participants at the conferences equated child domestic service with “slavery,” talked of beatings, sexual abuse and, in their zeal to please funding institutions and win support, presented it as epidemic. Lumping together every Haitian child between the ages of five and seventeen and not living with their parents in the category of child domestic servant, the experts came up with estimates ranging from 100,000 to 250,000, translating to 5 to 12 percent of all Haitian children in this age category (25% of the Haitian population is between the ages of 4 and 15 and 32% between the ages of 4 and 18; UNICEF 1993; Dorélien 1982; 1990; Clesca 1984).

Read Part 3 of the interview. I am extremely grateful to Dr. Tim Schwartz for his time and energy in participating in the interview.

Books you purchase through these links are priced the same as going directly through Amazon.com and helps to support martyduren.com through sales commissions.

A busy street near a Red Cross hospital complex in Port-au-Prince. Photo: Marty Duren

Travesty in Haiti: A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking

Over the course of the next several days my interview with Dr. Schwartz will be published on martyduren.com. Following this series I hope to further explore the international aid situation, with an emphasis on how it applies to Haiti, though other global examples will be examined.

My hope is that this teeming mass of Americans who have become concerned about the plight of Haiti will educate themselves about why and how Haiti was devastated well before the January 12 earthquake and what might be done to render true assistance in the aftermath.

MD: Did any changes take place in food aid after your book came out?

Schwartz: Well, no. Except that Meghann Curtis, who works for Hilary Clinton and Cheryl Mills, wrote me and said the State Department was rewriting U.S. policy with hopes it would not resemble the American Plan that was described in Travesty. So in that sense it had an impact. Not because it caused them to change the policy, but it apparently helped them understand the problems they face.

The book is just now catching on, but I am no longer among a small minority objecting to food aid. Since I wrote Travesty a growing number of agencies, even NGOs who were involved in food distribution, have come out against it. Oxfam is currently leading the charge.

I think this is great but I don’t want to give them too much credit because everyone–that is everyone who is thinking and in the field–has always known that food aid damages the agricultural markets in underdeveloped countries. I mean it is an incredible paradox that agronomists whose first lesson in agro-industrialism was about buying up surpluses were part of dumping food on the agricultural economies they were supposed to be building. They aren’t stupid. They knew. Everyone was always outraged. But quietly.

As I detail in Travesty, CARE consultants and even the heads of the food programs were at times outspoken about their opposition to the food. There were heated arguments. Seminars. But the bottom line was that the people on the ground are not making the decisions. For CARE, it is the headquarters in Atlanta that makes the decisions and their decision was to take the equivalent of 15 million US aid dollars–in food–and do what USAID told them to do.

And it should be clear that it is not USAID who is making the decision either. They are taking their orders from congress.

And congress is taking its orders from special interests.

As for CARE, to their credit, the conscience of someone inside must have won out, or at least caused them to stumble. In 2007, USAID was negotiating a new contract with them. I recently learned the details because a new friend was involved on behalf of USAID. The contract was for five years of distributing food aid. CARE had been trying to get away for food aid for over a decade and obviously they were increasingly nervous about it. This is the era when Oxfam and other groups were making a lot of noise. There were/are pages on the Internet dedicated to opposing food aid as well as protests in Geneva. But, as my friend says, “they had a dilemma because food aid was a cash cow for CARE.” So this time, in 2007, they tried to compromise.

CARE said they would sign a contract for 2 years, but USAID likes five year contracts. The food aid delivery is a bidding process, and so USAID folks whispered to the ears of those at the World Food Program, which put in a “competitive bid,”–I use the quotes because there are only a handful of NGOs who are allowed to bid on USAID projects–and CARE was/is out the food distribution process in Haiti .

MD: Other books have been written chronicling aid problems in places like Somalia. Is the failure of international aid endemic?

Schwartz: Yes, I think so. Although I only have firsthand experience in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

I once had a professor, Robert Lawless, who was a really profound thinker; he would recount the calamities of aid throughout the world telling us about these massive projects that backfired. He was a big fan of indigenous knowledge and really respected people.

In the years I was working in Haiti I somehow forgot much of that. But since writing the book and corresponding with Lawless again–after I came out of the field–I realized that he had already prepared me for what I found.

Also, I have heard similar stories from people who have worked for NGOs in Africa and other areas of Latin America. And, I read Michael Marner’s The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. I read it after I published Travesty and I was glad; the similarities were so great that it would have made me feel like I copied him. He wrote a terrific book and the portrait he painted of aid in Somalia is chilling, but I am not surprised. When I read the book I felt like I was right there with him, like I had already seen it. And I had. It was the same neglect, waste, economic disruption, self-deception, rationalization, and greed as we see in Haiti, but with even more cataclysmic consequences.

MD: In your experience, what has been the single most frustrating thing about US policy toward Haiti?

Schwartz: It is not about developing Haiti. It is about developing US business interests; which is fine. Haitians don’t vote for US politicians. But the problem–and this is the point that I hope I make most forcefully in the book–concerns the organizations that claim they are working for the poorest of poor; it’s simply not true. They are working for the US, French, German, and Canadian special interests. And they all know this.

These organizations are staffed by an almost uniformly good bunch of people. People who set out to help, who wanted to change the world, alleviate poverty, but they got caught up in the industry of aid and those dreams get swept away and replaced by hope for a salary raise, a pension plan, a promotion, better working conditions. This is where the biggest frustration comes in for me.

Back in the US there is a whole different set of good people who are sending in donations and voting for these organizations, cheering them on. They are doing this because they think the money is going to help the poor and hungry and illiterate overseas. They aren’t donating money so that it can pay some other American or German a middle to upper class salary and pension plan or so the director of CARE can send his children to a $25,000 per year private school. They are giving that money to help the poor in other countries…and it just ain’t happening.

These other good people, the NGO employees who are the recipients of most the aid, seem powerless to change things and then, as time and their careers progress, less and less disposed to try to change it.

Yeah, that’s frustrating. But US policy, ideally, should focus on helping other countries develop. I can understand why it doesn’t since politics is politics and corporate interests tend to be first.

My beef is with the civil/NGO sector. They are the ones we finance to defend and help the poor. They need to be held accountable. They need to do what they say they are going to do.

Read Part 2 of this interview.

An 1895 Atlanta, Georgia chain gang. Photo: georgiaencyclopedia.org

MD: You were “reared,” according to your bio, in the Mississippi Delta. How did being raised in that specific locale affect the writing of the book, or did it?

Blackmon: I have been writing about race and even more so I have been perplexed about why the world that I grew up in in Mississippi in the 1960’s and 70’s. Even as a kid I had an abnormally large interest in and concern that something was really strange about this sort of segregated, half-segregated world that I lived in.

I was one of a very small number of white kids that were in the public school system in this little farm town and was in the first class in Mississippi to begin the first grade together black and white. When the Supreme Court ordered the immediate integration of 30 school districts in Mississippi in 1969, they closed the school segregated before Christmas, reopened them integrated after Christmas. I began first grade in 1970, so I was in the first class to start on the first day and go through twelve grades together.

In most towns in the delta, which is a majority black area, but more so then than it is now, what that meant was that all whites left immediately, except a small number. In my town it was different in that there was a small group of white farmers who, while not particularly liberal, believed that the school system needed to be saved. There was a group of more moderate whites who pledged to send their kids to the public school system. When those schools integrated they became 70% black instead of 99% black. I went to a school that was about a quarter to a third white all the way through 12th grade.

So I had lived in this majority black world in my school days, but everything else in my life remained largely segregated. Segregated baseball teams, segregated Boy Scout troops, and segregated church for all intents and purposes. It was just a very hostile environment. Even as a kid I was acutely aware something was wrong and started writing about it. I wrote an essay in the seventh grade, which was the beginning of my writing about it. In many respects I view it all as one continuum of things that I’ve written about and the book is just the biggest chunk of things that I’ve done.

MD: When the book was published and people who had read it began talking to you about it, how many people were completely unfamiliar with these events in history from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War 2 and the demise of the convict-lease system?

Blackmon: Most. The vast majority of people say that-white and black. There is a very significant subset of people who have studied 20th century American history or academics who’ve studied this or others who’ve studied this on their own. It’s like when Eric Foner’s book, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, came out in the late ‘80s. If you were a student of history, you would have known a lot of facts that pertained to Foner’s work, but Reconstruction articulated what had happened and articulated the idea that the way the puzzle pieces had been put together in the past was distorted if not grossly false. Even people who thought they had a very up-to-date view, recognized this was different from the classic, historical view of Reconstruction. There were many savvy Reconstruction scholars who were suddenly dwarfed by this interpretation.

In the same way, there are many people who are familiar with the facts [of the convict-lease scheme], but didn’t have the jigsaw pieces put together. Some people said they knew all about it, or were under the impression that they did, but really they didn’t. Certainly it has been true that people who had not studied this had no comprehension of what had happened and I do think it’s true for the vast majority of black and white Americans the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Civil Rights movement is just a blank space.

MD: Do you think that some kind of reparations is due to African Americans living today?

Blackmon: I think the notion of reparations that has been most discussed is this idea of some sort of cash payment to living African Americans to make up for antebellum slavery or something after that. It sounds good in theory and you can make a compelling intellectual argument for that, but I think mechanically and legally it’s impossible. The problem, particularly with antebellum slavery, is who owes the money? There were 200,000 Union Soldiers who died to end slavery; does that change the calculations? Even with these atrocities that I write about there is a statue of limitations, so after a certain point in time you have no legal remedy for things that happened in the past. People like Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School have really tried to test the boundaries of the legalities and so far have not been able to bring anything to pass. It seems the only way would be a political resolution, where Congress would pass laws to facilitate it. My general view is that it is complicated and it is probably not the most productive way.

What I do think is that we already know from the experience of the last 40 years, since 1970, that when African Americans have had access to the main wealth generating mechanisms in America they have had fantastic achievement. Even though it doesn’t always work as well as we want, things like affirmative action have provided benefits, both to individuals and to society as a whole, that are fantastic-just exponentially great.

Slavery By Another Name and other books covering the same time period can be ordered through the links below. You pay the same as going directly to Amazon.com and I get a referral fee. Thanks for supporting martyduren.com.

John Spivak photographed this bound African American man while researching his 1932 book, Georgia Nigger.

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Because of the depth of today’s subject matter and the length of the answer, only one question from the interview will be featured. This is part 3 of 4. (Click for Part 1 and Part 2.)

MD: Willie Clark, a 90 year-old lifelong resident of Pratt City, Alabama, told you of stories he had received from his father of some workers who died in the mines and were, at the instruction of company officials, not buried, but tossed into the red-hot coke ovens on the property. When I read this, I could not help but think of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. As you studied through this, besides the dehumanizing aspects used by the Nazi regime, did you find anything else where you thought, “Gosh, this is like what happened in Nazi Germany”?

Blackmon: Yes. There are all kinds of parallels.

It is important to say at the front, that you cannot compare infinite anything to infinite anything, so you can’t compare infinite evil. What I would say is, what happened to African Americans during the period of time was the product of infinite evil as was the case with what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany. There is no unit of measurement with which to measure infinity, so it is risky to compare them; however, there are all sorts of valid comparisons.

There are lessons in general for all humanity and certainly for the Western world. There are lessons on why the Holocaust was so terrible, why it was more than the murder of 6 million Jews. There are lessons of memory: How do we remember these events and why? But the fundamental similarity between these two things was, in fact, by virtue of the exercise of the dehumanizing of a minority group of people which was the gateway to a sequence of events aimed at their ultimate destruction.

As it was, the United States had a tremendous genocidal impulse toward African Americans, but it was tempered by a utilitarianism that recognized these individuals were so fundamental to the economic system that no one would have comprehended killing them all as a solution. Though the United States had decided, in the case of the subset of Native Americans, to just kill off so many of them that the rest will get out of sight. So Americans felt pretty comfortable with genocide by that point and was really helped by that, just as was the case in Germany.

Joseph Goebbels urges a crowd in Berlin to boycott Jewish Businesses in 1933. Photo: US National Archives

But in a more specific kind of way, Hitler talked about drawing many of his ideas from the segregation practices of the United States and there was a great exchange of ideas between German scientists and American scientists in the field of genetics. At the time, it was all in the vein of this white supremacy. Hitler was very aware that America was the first place to come up with the beginnings of an apartheid structure, so those ideas were adopted and adapted to be much more constraining in Germany.

The key element in the south, then, of perverting the criminal justice system into an instrument of injustice against blacks, was the exception of the 13th amendment, which states a person may not be placed in involuntary servitude except in the case of persons duly convicted of a crime. The idea was, then, that people could be enslaved if they had been duly convicted. The south began to change thousands of laws to make it effectively impossible for a black person to live in the south and not be in violation of some law at some time. This is particularly true when laws are written that are on their face unconstitutional since they cannot really be defined, such as making it a crime to disturb white women on a train. What does that mean to “disturb”? Only a black man would ever be charged with disturbing a white woman. These kinds of laws were only enforced against blacks and the south came up with all these types of laws and piled them on and piled them on to criminalize black life. The most notorious of them all was the law that made it a crime for a farm worker to seek employment from one farmer without first getting permission from his current employer. That was explicitly to say, ‘You cannot leave the place you are in without getting permission from the white man,’ which is enslavement in its own way. If a worker attempted to do it, then he would be enslaved through the criminal justice system.

Since this whole process was being invented in America, having not been done before, it took several decades, from the 1870s to around the first decade of the 20th century, to create this world where the black man, unless he never speaks a word, never crosses the line and never asks for anything other than what is being offered to him is in jeopardy of all these terrible things happening to him. That’s similar to the anti-thrift laws of 1936, when Germany adopted a code of law that penalized behavior in the same way. In the year Dachau was opened, the people who were held were not Jews who were rounded up because they were Jews, they were enemies of the state who had violated German law. Then all of those Jews not in Dachau were terrified by the laws and the system and changed their lives in the kinds of ways needed to avoid the penalties involved.

Then the level of brutality, the abject indifference to whether the person would survive, also has its own set of parallels. You did not have a point in the convict lease system where all the needed work had been finished, so that a decision would be made to kill them all in an organized way. But there are all these other echoes and the fact that at the Pratt Mines, as was reported by Willie Clark, bodies of dead workers were tossed into the fires and that’s the reason I put it in the book. And who’s to say how much that happened? There aren’t any U.S. Steel records like the Germans kept, but we do know that those who weren’t thrown into ovens were just thrown into a hole out in a field. There are one or two photographs of those “burials.” The would just dig ditches as fast as they could, throw a bunch of bodies in with no record of who’s there or who’s where.

Slavery By Another Name can be ordered through the link below. You pay the same as going directly to Amazon.com and I get a referral fee. Thanks for supporting martyduren.com.

Exterior of a convict keep in Lee County, Alabama. Photo: E. W. Russell

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

This is part 2 of 4 in this interview, conducted January 7, 2010, in Atlanta, GA. (Click here to read part 1.)

MD: You mention in the book that there were some people in the black community today who wondered why it appeared that African Americans lagged behind in progress, when emancipation happened more than 100 years ago. Do you have any kind of feel for the number of African American men who were ultimately trapped in the convict-lease scheme which potentially affected their progress?

Blackmon: Well, definitions are important in answering this. There were two kinds of leased convicts: felony and misdemeanor. We can actually come up with a pretty accurate number of how many men were convicted of a felony in a state court and were placed into prison at a time when those convicts were leased out. I don’t know that number off the top of my head. In Alabama it would be 200,000 over a 50-year period of time, which is, in some respects, not that big of a number. But then there was the county system that handled the misdemeanor offenses. Because the state records are well documented and there’s a good bit of information there, most penal historians who’ve looked at any aspect of this made the mistake, frankly, of thinking that the county version of it didn’t have as many records or the records were just a mess so no one really knows what happened there. In fact, there’s a tremendous amount of material, if you can find it, which paints the picture of a county system that was much worse, and logic might tell you that’s the case. There are an awful lot more parking tickets written in Atlanta than murder convictions and where there were around 200,000 in Alabama convicted of felonies, there were hundreds and hundreds of thousands sentenced in the county court systems in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, the Carolinas, Louisiana and Texas. We can’t get a firm number on that; it could easily have been a million. There could have been some who went in and went out of the system many times.

In 1910 there were 10-13 million African Americans, so at most, during any given time, the percentage of men involved in this was certainly smaller, as a percentage of the population, than are currently incarcerated in this country. But, it was a substantial thing, because if you were an African American living in this country, living in the south in 1905, 1910 or 1920, then you were aware that every few weeks a bunch of people just disappeared! Sometimes they came back and sometimes they didn’t and when they did come back, they were a mess since they’d been brutalized. If you were a sharecropper, you absolutely knew this was happening. You also knew that if you went against the system by insisting, for instance, that you not be cheated out of your share of the cotton at the end of the season, then that whole apparatus was going to be turned onto you. So, even though many had this difficult life as a sharecropper, at least they were not being sold to go work in a coalmine for six months with nobody knowing where they were. They went along with the “machine” because of their terror of what might happen. That’s the part that’s even more difficult to measure.

In 1910, of the 12 or 13 million African Americans in the United States, the great majority of them were sharecroppers or tenant farmers in the Deep South. These, in one way or another, were affected by the threat of the convict lease system. That’s why it isn’t just the convict lease system; these others were de facto involuntary workers

Because of this, there is no way to put an absolute to the number people who were in the system, but easily at least half of the African Americans were affected in the first part of the 1900s since they were living in fear of all this and were circumscribing their lives in some way or another because of it.

Interior of a convict keep in Lee County, AL. Photo: E. W. Russell

Blackmon: Not in this-no! There are companies like Wachovia Bank who I talk a little bit about in the book, did at one point make inquiries into its connection to slavery and apologized for some of that. AETNA Insurance has issued an apology and some others for their role in antebellum slavery. But I don’t know of anybody who has issued an apology for what happened after slavery.

When I first went to the U.S. Steel Corporation about all this, their response was, “We don’t know about any of that and all of our records are gone.” Which I’m fairly certain is not true. They may believe that to be true, but it’s not true. Essentially their response was, “If what you say is true and we caused the deaths or injuries to some people wrongly, then we regret that. But, it’s in the past and there’s nothing we can do about it today.”

MD: In your research did you find any religious bodies, churches or even synagogues, if there were any in the south back then, who spoke out against the convict lease system or organized to try and stop it?

Blackmon: All of the religious aspects to this are very interesting to me. In almost every public presentation I make of this material, almost every one, someone will ask, “Where was the church in all this?”

This is why I started the book with the wedding of Henry Cottinham and Mary Bishop, freed slaves, with their ceremony being performed by John Wesley Starr who had previously preached to whites that slavery was a human order ordained by God and to blacks that theirs was a glorified place among the chickens and the pigs. The failure of the church to recognize and speak out against slavery was really an important issue that is huge to understanding as to how any of this played out. So my answer is that the church was complicit.

However, it is true that in 1900, there began to be some voices in the south beginning to say that the convict lease system was abusive and there was mistreatment, but these voices were raised loudest when a white person was abused who had been in the system. And there were some preachers who would preach about its abuses on occasion, so there were some voices. There were religious voices, there were the successors to religious abolitionists and there were some voices outside the south asking if the convict lease system was not a continuation of slavery. So there was a sprinkling of those things. It was the kind of thing that a typical historian would be tempted to exaggerate, because they did stand out. If you read 1,000 pages of Alabama newspapers from the first decade of the 20th century you’ll find a fair number of editorials against the convict lease system and it might tempt you to believe that there was a meaningful opposition. But the reality was that those were just voices screaming into the wind, and the odds are pretty good that they only screamed into the wind that week and then stopped screaming.

Perversely, there were some in the religious world who did not like the convict lease system, because it sucked people out of the available pool of sharecroppers. They made their money off sharecropping, so it was a competitive thing.

Ultimately, there were some voices of opposition, but there never was the Methodist Conference of Alabama or the Southern Baptist Convention taking a principled stand against the convict lease system.

Slavery By Another Name can be ordered through the link below. You pay the same as going directly to Amazon.com and I get a referral fee. Thanks for supporting martyduren.com.

Wagons like this one in Pitt County, NC carried leased convicts across the south. Photo: Library of Congress

Douglas A. Blackmon is the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal and winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for his extraordinary book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

It was an honor to spend an hour interviewing Douglas Blackmon at a very noisy Atlanta Starbucks a week and half ago. What follows over the next four days at martyduren.com is the substance of that interview. Any transcribed mistakes owing to lack of clarity in recording and playback are mine alone.

MD: The book, essentially, began as a story you did for the Wall Street Journal. How did you get from the article to the full story?

Blackmon:Well, honestly? I spent about a year on that original story which was very focused on this one group of coal mines outside of Birmingham and Green Cottenham was mentioned in one paragraph of that story, maybe two places altogether. The story was that and I did not have any interest in doing any more with it; I thought I was done. But after the story came out, there was a really huge reaction to it, so Doubleday, the publisher, called and said that I should write a book about this. Initially, I said, “No,” but we talked more about it. I told them that if I were to write a book it would not be the kind of book that a major publisher would want to publish, that they would not be serious enough or whatever. But, they were interested, so I agreed to do it. It was after I started working on it that I really had no idea what the book was supposed to be! Was it just an expansion of the story I had done before? Was it a story about a single person? Was it something else? So it forced me to accept that possibility that maybe whatever had ever been written about any of this before is not the gospel, maybe there is something new to say about things people thought there was nothing new to say about. So I was able to start with kind of a blank slate, which was frustrating in the sense of “Where do I go?” or “What do I start looking at?” but good to be open to come to the conclusions that I came to many years later.

MD:For those who haven’t read the book, can you give a brief synopsis of what the convict lease system was and how it operated?

Blackmon: The convict lease system operated when a person, usually an African American man, was arrested for a crime that had occurred, for instance, they burglarized a farm house, was taken before the judge and either plead or was found guilty. Or, let’s say it was a misdemeanor like stealing a chicken instead of a felony. Typically in Alabama and other states at that time people were punished with fines instead of a jail sentence. So he would be fined $1-30 for a $5 theft, plus paying back the money to the owner. In 1901, the average farm worker’s annual income, if he had an income, would have been $75-85. So a fine of $10, 20 or 30 was a very substantial thing. But on top of that, the convict would be assessed a whole series of fees, because there were no taxes to pay for the criminal justice system, so the fees that were collected paid for deputies for the sheriff and all sorts of other folks. In addition to his fine, the convict would be charged a fee for his arrest, a fee for having a warrant served on him, a fee for every witness who testified against him, a fee for the court clerk, basically a whole range of things. The fees on a $20-30 fine would typically add up to $80-100. A very common thing was to be fined the equivalent of two years work for a one or two dollar theft.

When farm workers, whether black or white, were unable to pay that and unable to pay the fines, one of two things would happen. The judge could say, “In lieu of the fines, we’ll sentence you to three years of hard labor to be performed with this company that has a contract with the court and the county sheriff to take control of all prisoners who come to the jail.” Then the prisoner would be “leased” to the company who would pay monthly, having paid at the end of three years all of his fines and fees. Or, someone from the county would come to the jail and strike a bargain with the prisoner to pay the fine for him. This was sometimes even done before the conviction; it was called, “confessing judgment.” The payer of the fine would then negotiate with the prisoner to work a year, two years or five years until the money was repaid. In these cases, the prisoners, 90% of whom were black men, would find themselves working involuntarily as a result of these arrangements.

Had this all been legitimate and only involved people who had actually committed crimes and been convicted of crimes, then we would just view that as a very tough type of putative, penal practices. It was harsh, but not necessarily immoral or criminal. But the reality was, what that system did was create a market for people. What it did was create a market for people in a society which, when this began in the 1870s, was just 10 years removed from when people owned people and the idea of buying and selling humans was still natural. This new economic market mechanism for valuing men and trafficking in them, very quickly many people realized a new way to again take possession of a black man who had been their slave only a decade before. So if a white man wanted to take control of such a man or his now grown sons, all he had to do was swear out a warrant against them, claim that they stole the overalls they were wearing from the white man’s place. The white man would be believed by the court, the black man would stand no chance whatsoever, have no way to pay the fine–especially when the white man worked out a deal with the sheriff to only pay $10 when the fine was $50. Then for a year or two years the white man had complete control over the man and his sons. At the end, the white man could say, “Well, you still owe me for that visit to the doctor,” or “You still owe me for that potato you stole,” and have him on the farm for another year or two.

As a result, you have thousands and thousands of people being kidnapped, either actual physical kidnapping being snatched up from the side of the road and forced into all of this or being kidnapped by your neighbor or the man you worked for who decides he does not want to share the crop with you anymore so he turns you into a convict. That was the corrupt aspect of this that makes it impossible to measure. Once it became this “thing” that really had no rules, had no limits, had no controls, if you were an African American in the rural part of the south, you had no defenses. That is when terror is complete. There are no rules and no defenses and no way to predict the behavior of this oppressive force. Then you are in a state of involuntary servitude whether you know it or not because you are just trying to survive.

MD: Once in the system they could be subleased and subleased over and again until someone who had entered the system in Montevallo, Alabama could wind up in north Florida with no family member or friend even knowing where they were or if they were still alive, correct?

Blackmon: Exactly. And it became such a big enterprise, as far as that goes, that it was the single largest source of revenue for the state of Alabama and nearly the largest for Georgia. This was the case for several decades in Alabama, probably from the 1800s to the 1920s. Part of that was because states collected so few taxes, but it was one of the first ways that the state of Alabama accumulated large amounts of money. What that led to also was a tremendous amount of corruption. There was so much money to be made off it that state officials were taking kickbacks to steer convicts to certain companies or people. A lot of what we know about the system, we know because of periodic investigations into the corruption side, which revealed some of these other things on the brutality side .

Also there were many, many people who got into the business of being brokers and middle men for one party who held a thousand leases for the state of Alabama who would then subdivide and broker those leases out.

There are many touching, terrible stories about mothers going on a quest to try and find where a son or somebody ended up and finding them four or five places removed from the entry point. You also have people who were just lost into the system. The prisoners themselves would not know when they supposedly were to be freed; whoever had acquired them would not know or would not care and you wind up with these stories of the people who worked for four or five years somewhere when they had been sentenced to 30 days of hard labor.

Slavery By Another Name can be ordered through the link below. You pay the same as going directly to Amazon.com and I get a referral fee. Thanks for supporting martyduren.com.