The American chain gang is a haunting symbol of the nation’s failure to fulfill the promise of freedom after the Civil War. It represents a line between slavery and incarceration, a system that was built to punish crime but to reassert racial hierarchy under the appearance of law and order. From the Reconstruction era to the 20th century, the image of chained prisoners laboring on dusty roads was used to show a public spectacle of control and forced servitude. Filmmakers, artists, and scholars have each interpreted this differently; together, their works reveal how the chain gang has changed from a brutal tool of racial oppression into a metaphor for rebellion and injustice.
Elliot Mamet’s 2023 article, “This Unfortunate Development”: Incarceration and Democracy in W.E.B. Du Bois, provides a critical foundation to understand the historical origins of the chain gang. Mamet examines how the System emerged after Reconstruction to undermine Du Bois’s “abolition democracy,” an idea of a multiracial, egalitarian society freed from the remaining vestiges of slavery. [2] Around the end of the Civil War, the South lost the right to own enslaved people but not the right to exploit their labor. The states passed the “Black Code,” which criminalized homelessness and minor infractions, leading to a mass arrest of Black citizens. These people were forced into state-run chain gangs. As Mamet explains, institutions like the prison system and the chain gang show that freedom for Black Americans was conditional, easy to revoke, and surveilled. The chain gang was not just a punishment but rather a performance of power. Black men forced to work in public view, shackled together, reminding everyone of who had control in the South after the war. The system was made incarceration a key weapon to maintain white supremacy and economic exploitation. As Du Bois witnessed in The Souls of Black Folk, freedom without any economic independence or any political equality amounted to a mere mockery, which persisted for generations.
As time progressed, the image of the chain gang changed. In the essay, “The Monochrome Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (1967)”, James Emmette Ryan explores how the 20th century popular culture helped reimagine. The film Cool Hand Luke depicts the chain gang as a story of rebellion against authority, erasing the racial history of the events and practices. [1] As Ryan states, Hollywood rewrote the chain gang into a symbol of individual defiance, but not systemic racial oppression. A struggling white supremacist replaced the suffering endured by Black prisoners who endured chain gang labor, as portrayed by Paul Newman. This reinterpretation shows the broader societal tendency to separate the nation’s identity from its history of racial violence, as it turns Black pain and suffering into a backdrop for white redemption. Ryan’s analysis undermines how cultural memory distorts the truth, by framing the chain gang as a story of rebellion, films like Cool Hand Luke removed the image of imprisonment from the racial roots. This allows the audience to be sympathetic to this imprisonment without confronting the racial reality that gave it shape.
In contrast, the poet Dominique Christina can restore the correct narrative to humanity and history itself. Her poem “Chain Gang” invites readers to a physical and emotional reality of those who endured forced labor. [3] Christina’s use of words, rhythms, and the pain of the men at Parchman Farm, a Mississippi prison plantation. Aside from the dehumanization, she shows how prisoners often used music, songs, and memory to preserve their dignity. Her poem is a form of resistance to show an assertion of life in the face of a system based on cruelty. As Ryan critiques culture removal, Christina sets out to rebuild memory through the art of music, turning the voices into a living chorus.
In conclusion, together these sources reveal that the chain gang was both a historical staple and a cultural viewpoint. The legacy of the chain gang is not confined to history books; it lives on through modern incarceration and forced prison labor. To study the chain gang is not to confront a reminder that true abolition needs freedom from the chain as well as the system that forged them.
WORK CITED:
[1] . Ryan, James Emmett. “The Monochrome Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (1967).” Film & History 51, no. 1 (Summer 2021): 44–56.
[2] . Mamet, Elliot. “This Unfortunate Development: Incarceration and Democracy in W. E. B. Du Bois.” Political Theory 51, no. 2 (April 2023): 382–412.
[3] . Christina, Dominique. “Chain Gang.” Poetry 208, no. 1 (April 1, 2016): 20–24.