THE WEEKLY REVEAL

Hello! In this issue:

• How companies across the South profited off the forced labor of people in prison after the Civil War.
   
• In this week’s democracy roundup: Fake history and fraudulent documents.
   
• RogerEbert.com calls “The Grab” the “holy shit documentary of the year.”

THIS WEEK’S PODCAST

Locked Up: The Prison Labor That Built Business Empires

After the Civil War, a new form of slavery took hold in the U.S. and lasted more than 60 years.
 
This week on Reveal, Associated Press reporters Margie Mason and Robin McDowell investigate the chilling history of how Southern states imprisoned mainly Black men, often for minor crimes, and then leased them out to private companies – for years, even decades, at a time. The practice was called convict leasing.
 
The team talks with the descendant of a man imprisoned in the Lone Rock stockade in Tennessee nearly 140 years ago, where people as young as 12 worked under subhuman conditions in coal mines and inferno-like ovens used to produce iron. This system of forced prison labor enriched the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad company – at the cost of prisoners’ lives.
 
The Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad company eventually moved its headquarters to Alabama, a state where convict leasing was booming – it made up 70% of Alabama’s total revenue. Industrial giant U.S. Steel took over the company in 1907 and used forced prison labor for at least five years. 
 
During that time, more than 100 men died while working in U.S. Steel’s massive coal mining operation. The company has misrepresented this dark chapter of its history – and it has never apologized for its use of forced labor or the lives lost. Mason and McDowell push the company to answer questions about its past and engage with communities near the former mines.

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This Week’s Democracy Reads

We believe the coordinated effort to destroy American democracy is the defining story of our time. It’s the overarching storyline under which all our most pressing issues will be addressed or exacerbated. But in our decentralized election system, the threats are playing out in different ways in different counties across the country. That’s why we launched this new section last week to help you keep track of it all.

📄  A fraudulent document is being used to support a Supreme Court case that could blow up election law. The “independent state legislature theory” used to be an obscure footnote, but it’s becoming central to the MAGA attempts to thwart state vote certifications. The theory is now being tested by conservative North Carolina legislators before the Supreme Court – with the help of a well-known fake document from 1818.

“Nevertheless, the North Carolina legislators claim they have discovered that our 200-year understanding of the meaning of the Constitution is wrong, that the framers actually intended to give state legislatures nearly unchecked power over congressional elections. They claim that the Supreme Court must throw out all our election rules and reorder our governing practice to effectuate that purpose.” (Politico)

📄  Election deniers are inundating election offices in a coordinated campaign to seek 2020 records. Egged on by the My Pillow guy, supporters of election fraud myths have been bombarding elections departments across the country with near-identical requests for what’s known as the “cast vote record.” They believe the records could help detect fraudulent voting patterns in that election. A cast vote record is generated by ballot-counting machines and is the electronic representation of how people voted. However, experts say the document can’t be used to detect fraudulent voting patterns.

“It is the latest example of the endless, fruitless quest for a smoking gun that has so far yielded no proof of wrongdoing affecting the election results.” (Votebeat)

📄  It’s very hard for Americans who struggle to read to vote. “For all of the recent uproar over voting rights, little attention has been paid to one of the most sustained and brazen suppression campaigns in America: the effort to block help at the voting booth for people who struggle to read – a group that amounts to about 48 million Americans, or more than a fifth of the adult population.”

And one woman has gone to jail trying to stop it. (ProPublica)

📄  One way to try to stop the anti-democratic forces: Show that there are consequences for their actions. There are currently two major criminal investigations into the effort to overturn the 2020 election, and they’ve both been heating up. This week, the U.S. Justice Department seized the phones of two former top Trump advisers and sent about 40 subpoenas to his aides, signaling a significant ramp-up in their investigation into the events around Jan. 6. At the same time, the district attorney – Fani T. Willis – in Fulton County, Georgia, appears to be testing a racketeering case stemming from Trump’s pressure campaign to get Republican officials there to find him the 12,000 votes he needed to win the state.

Is there a specific democracy issue you want us to curate reporting around? Do you have a question about a certain state and its election? Anything goes. Email us at [email protected].

A Quote to Remember

“Who do you think you are? The IRS?”

— True the Vote’s lawyer, James Bopp Jr., in response to reporter Cassandra Jaramillo’s questions on why the group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, had received loans from the election-denying nonprofit’s donations. (Hear the clip on Instagram.)

According to the nonprofit’s 2015 tax filings, it issued Engelbrecht a $40,000 loan. In 2018, it disclosed an outstanding $60,000 loan to Engelbrecht and more than $113,000 in 2019. In Texas, where the group is based, the law says nonprofit directors can’t receive loans.

In Case You Missed It

Ending on a Good Note

Investigative journalists Nathan Halverson, Emma Schwartz and Mallory Newman in a still from “The Grab” documentary. Credit: Jonathan Ingalls