Judging from the wood engraving of Lindsey’s studio on the back of the mount, this photograph was printed after Lindsey’s 1890-1892 partnership with E. E. Brown ended; Brown’s name has been removed from the signs in the picture. The title comes from Lindsey’s catalogue of photographs for sale, where images are listed by negative number. A different view is known with the same title and number, perhaps because the negative used for this image was cracked in the lower right hand corner and needed to be replaced. The studio sold photographs in this size for 25 cents each or $2.50 per dozen.

Views of North Carolina scenery made up the majority of Lindsey’s subjects. “Stripes but no Stars” appeared in a special section of the photographer’s catalogue — Class Z:

In this class is represented all kinds of Character and Comic Subjects, such as rude Mountain Teams, Moutain Vehicles, Cabins where the lower classes exist — views photographed from real life during our rambles through the mountains. To many, this is the most interesting class in our entire list.

Labor unions campaigned against forced work by convicts in the 1890s, and won some important victories. But there was a powerful economic incentive to keep prisoners at work –and even to take in more prisoners for the purposes of convict labor:

After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery for all people except those convicted of a crime. Legally allowing any such individual to be subjected to slavery and involuntary servitude opened the door for mass criminalization: a social mechanism designed to bar the liberty and equality that was the promise of emancipation from slavery. When African Americans were no longer legally held as slaves or property, there was a tremendous increase in the number of African-American convicts…

When slavery was legally abolished, the Slave Codes were rewritten as the Black Codes, a series of laws criminalizing legal activity for African Americans. Through the enforcement of these laws, acts such as standing in one area of town or walking at night, for example, became the criminal acts of “loitering” or “breaking curfew” for which African Americans were imprisoned. In the late 19th-century South, an extensive prison system was developed in the interest of maintaining the power, race, and economic relationships of slavery.

–Julie Browne, “The Labor of Doing Time,” first published in Criminal Injustice: Confronting the Prison Crisis (Prison Activist Resource Center). For full text in a new browser window, click here. Close the new window to return to this page.