The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.13, page 524, 18 Jan. 1911, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers a labor contract. Previous to this Bailey had formed a contract with the Riverside Company, a farming company, and upon this contract had secured the sum of $~5 which he was to repay out of his wages at the rate of $. a month. After working a month and a few days, Bailey quit the company without repaying the remainder due on his loan. Now the laws of Alabama are very severe against an offense of this kind. For more than a decade it has been a state regulation that if a laborer formed a contract with another person with the intent to defraud and quit before the money secured on the basis of the contract had been repaid or without refunding he should be guilty of a misdemeanor, and the quitting per se made ''prima facie evidence of his intent to defraud his employer.'' Moreover, the ''defendant cannot testify in his own behalf as to his unexpressed intent.'' The penalty for this offense was that; the offender ''must on conviction be punished by a fine in double the damage suffered by the injured party, but not more than $300, one-half of said fine to go to the county and one-half to the party injured.'' Under this law Alonzo Bailey was therefore guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to the penalty just mentioned. As soon as Bailey was indicted his counsels instituted proceedings for habeas corpus, arguing that the labor contract law was contrary to both the federal constitution and to the constitution of the state, the latter of which reads that ''The right of trial by jury shall remain inviolate.'' The lower court and the Alabama supreme court, however, refused the writ of habeas corpus and sustained the contract law. Whereupon the case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court refusing upon a writ of error at first, the case was returned to Montgomery, Bailey duly tried and convicted and the case once more returned to the Supreme Court. The decision of this court was rendered Tuesday, January 36. The court declared, one dissenting, with Justice Hughes as spokesman, that such a law reduced hundreds of Negroes to a state closely akin to that of peonage and that a state could not reduce men to involuntary servitude by classing a debt as a crime. Justice Hughes, however, dismissed the question of Bailey's race or color by saying that there was nothing in the statutes to indicate discrimination against color but that 524