Paulette Richards

The convict leasing system that supported the industrialization of the New South was an extension of slavery that continues in our present mass incarceration crisis. I am currently producing a video installation combining interpretive text panels, a diorama featuring figures and a set from the video, and a 5-minute looping video using puppets to depict the lives of convicts who worked in Atlanta area quarries for display in the Hapeville Depot Museum. “Of Men and Mules” will use the African American folksong “Mule on the Mount” collected by Zora Neale Hurston to illustrate how the treatment of convicts leased to quarries compared unfavorably with the treatment of draft animals employed in quarry operations.