Bad Boys Make Good Roads

Abstract Southern states used convict labor to construct highways across the region in the first half of the twentieth century. As the mass-production of automobiles led to the modernization of infrastructure, Southern states relied on a racialized form of exploitative labor based on Black Codes that emerged from the end of slavery. Several works depict the use of chain gangs to construct highways, exposing the brutality of incarcerated labor. These works include Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang by muckraking journalist John L. Spivak and I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, the memoir of Robert Burns, an incarcerated man who escaped from a chain gang. These works demonstrate that modernization in the US South followed the contours of racial discrimination that distinguished the region from the antebellum period through the civil rights movement.