Newspaper accounts and meeting minutes of the Athens woman’s club detail Bass Holsey’s tireless, resourceful efforts to collaborate across racial lines to build an institution for Black Athenians. In Athens-Clarke County in 1906, she married Albon Holsey, where they lived on Barber Street with their four children, Augustus, Crosby, Willie, and Mary. She lived for a long period of time in Athens, Georgia, where she worked variously as a dressmaker, upholsterer, seamstress, housekeeper, and nurse. Martha Bass Holsey was born in Georgia in 1869, just after the Civil War. Additionally, four major collections of the DLG have been instrumental-vital, actually-in this effort: Georgia Historic Newspapers, For Our Mutual Benefit: The Athens Woman’s Club and Social Reform, 1899-1920, Athens, Georgia city directories, and Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for Georgia Towns and Cities, 1884-1941. Reconstructing the story of Bass Holsey’s life and work has been aided by genealogical sites such as and, as well as US Census Records. 1869-unknown), an African American upholsterer from Athens, Georgia, who reached across racial barriers in the Jim Crow South to establish a charitable home that served as an orphanage as well as a daycare for working Black families. One such welcome surprise was the story of Martha Bass Holsey (ca. As anyone who has spent time steeped in the archives understands, one of the excitements of this kind of research is that, in searching for one story, you are often led to another. After insightful conversations with colleagues and visitors who toured the Hargrett exhibit, I began researching Black-run and -owned charitable institutions in Georgia. What remains little-known of Georgia’s carceral systems is the fate of orphaned children whose parents were sentenced to labor in prison camps as well as the fate of those born in these camps. More than ten newspaper accounts from the original Hargrett exhibit were found in periodicals digitized by the Georgia Historic Newspapers database.
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Some notable stories gleaned from these publications included: a mutiny on behalf of Black and white female prisoners in Milledgeville, the flogging of a female prisoner named Mamie de Cris, coverage of a hungry Georgia resident jailed for stealing a chicken, the testimony of an assaulted female prisoner, and reports of Athens-Clarke County’s demand for incarcerated populations for road construction surrounding the University of Georgia. Coverage from the Atlanta Georgian and News and the Athens Weekly Banner was especially insightful. I heeded the same process to investigate Georgia’s convict lease and chain gang systems. The online exhibition, The New South and the New Slavery, is the result of this collaboration.Īs a scholar who specializes in late 19th- and early 20th-century African American and American Indian literature published in the periodical press, newspapers are among the first resources I consult when exploring a particular cultural or historical moment.
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After speaking with the Digital Library of Georgia and the New Georgia Encyclopedia about this project, they were enthusiastic about adapting the physical exhibit into a digital one. Titled “The New South and the New Slavery: Convict Labor in Georgia,” it examined the history of forced prison labor in Georgia beginning with the inception of the convict lease system in 1868 until its abolition in 1908, its transformation into the chain gang system that lasted until the 1940s, and its continuation with mass incarceration.
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In 2018, I curated an exhibit for the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library.