Edwards beat and forced Smith to work long hours for literally no pay. Smith worked 18 hours a day, six days a week, and banished to a “cockroach-infested” apartment behind the business. Edwards’ family knew Smith was being enslaved and did nothing to try and stop it.
Edwards would lock Smith in the kitchen freezer or another room so that his family couldn’t find him. Smith once tried to escape and was “hit in the head with a frying pan, burned with hot tongs, beaten with belt-buckles and called the n-word repeatedly.”
A South Carolina Judge orders a white man to pays $546,000 in wages to an intellectually disabled black man he kept hidden and away from his family and forced to perform labor-intensive tasks for no pay.
Bobby Paul Edwards, owner of J&J Cafeteria in Conway, South Carolina, enslaved John Christopher Smith, an intellectually disabled Black man.