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