Note 204 — Chapter XIV

Footnote 204: (return) Within recent years it has been thought that the convict lease system and peonage had practically passed in the South. That this was by no means the case was shown by the astonishing revelations from Jasper County, Georgia, early in 1921, it being demonstrated in court that a white farmer, John S. Williams, who had "bought out" Negroes from the prisons of Atlanta and Macon, had not only held these people in peonage, but had been directly responsible for the killing of not less than eleven of them.