Former workers for Ron Evans visit museum, share their own stories of debt, beatings, and escape…

North Florida crewleader Ron Evans is serving 30 years in jail today for holding workers in what federal prosecutors called “a form of servitude morally and legally reprehensible.”

As reported in the Associated Press (“Authorities say farmworkers lured into servitude with drugs, alcohol”), Evans recruited homeless US citizens from shelters across the southeast United States — including New Orleans, Tampa, and Miami — with promises of good jobs and housing. At Palatka, FL and Newton Grove, NC area labor camps, Evans deducted rent, food, crack cocaine and alcohol from workers’ pay, holding them “perpetually indebted.”

US v. Ronald Evans is one of the federal prosecutions featured in the Modern-Day Slavery Museum. And this past week, the museum was host to some very special visitors — two men who spent years working for Ron Evans, two men who told museum goers of their own personal experience of hell in Florida’s fields.

It was people’s history meets living history in St. Augustine this week. Click here to go to the big museum news page and read a first-hand report with photos from an unforgettable Week Four from the Modern-Day Slavery Museum!