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Prison Records of the Dade County Mines

This table, derived from the biennial report of Georgia’s Principal Keeper of the Penitentiary, details 10 of 303 prisoners in Senator Brown’s Dade County mines in 1882. While some white men were prosecuted and jailed under the state’s harsh laws, most prisoners were people of color. Words like “Yellow,” “Copper,” and “Brown” were part of nineteenth-century vernacular in the South and were used to describe African Americans based on perceived variations in skin tone.

Source: Biennial Report of the Principal Keeper of the Georgia Penitentiary from the 20th of October, 1880, to 20th of October, 1882, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112000799442.

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