SOCIAL media has erupted about a two-decade old revelation that Hillary and Bill Clinton used forced prison labour while in the Arkansas governor’s mansion.

A post shared on Twitter yesterday by activist Jeanette Jing contained two pages of Ms Clinton’s book It Takes A Village, which was released in 1996. It has since gone viral.

In it, the former Democratic Presidential Nominee recalls the African-American prisoners who worked at the mansion she shared with Bill while he led the state from 1979 to 1981, and again from 1983 to 1992.

“When we moved in, I was told that using prison labor (sic) at the governor’s mansion was a longstanding tradition, which kept down costs,” Ms Clinton revealed in the book.

While most of the forced workers were convicted murdered, she became friends with “a few of them, African-American men in their thirties who had already served 12 to 18 years of their sentences”.

media_camera Bill and Hillary Clinton after he won the Democratic run-off in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1982.

media_camera A two-decade old revelation that Hillary and Bill Clinton used forced prison labour while in the Arkansas governor’s mansion has caused furore. Picture: AP

Oddly, she reflected on their personalities, stating that they didn’t have “inferior IQs or an inability to apply moral reasoning” but observed they might have been “emotional illiterates”.

“We enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule,” she wrote.

Ms Jing said she considered the use of the prison labour as “modern day slavery” — a conclusion that many on the social media platform seemed to share.

“’A longstanding tradition which kept down costs’ means slavery, y’all,” she said.

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media_camera Hillary Clinton accepts a Grammy Award for the audio version of her book It Takes A Village.

While the facts are not new, their emergence has again called into question Ms Clinton’s stated record on race relations.

Twitter lit up with a mix of surprise and fury at the resurfacing of the passages, several months on from Ms Clinton’s defeat in the US election to billionaire and reality TV star Donald Trump.

She has re-emerged from something of an exile in recent weeks, speaking at a number of engagements about her campaign and the current White House administration.

It's remarkable that Clinton supporters are trying to find a way to blame Sanders for her using slave labor. — Dan Arel 🏴 (@danarel) 7 June 2017

This except from Hillary Clinton's 1996 book about use of de facto slave labor at Arkansas governor's mansion is doing the rounds. Shameful. pic.twitter.com/46wHOQ3pDT — ChristianChristensen (@ChrChristensen) 7 June 2017

Another activist Samuel Sinyangwe shared his experiences of black prisoners being forced to work for free for politicians.

He recalled visiting the Louisiana state legislature and seeing African-American inmates serving white politicians for free.

Mr Sinyangwe added that the US state has the world’s highest incarceration rate, with black people making up 66 per cent of that jailed population.

media_camera Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton with his wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea in 1993.

media_camera Hillary Clinton’s supporters say she still would’ve made a better president for people of colour than Donald Trump. Picture: AP

Ms Clinton’s supporters fired back at the decades-old revelations, saying she would’ve been a better president for people of colour than Mr Trump.

In the early 1970s, he and his real estate mogul father were sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against prospective renters who were black.

On Twitter, Ms Sinyangwe said that “2016 was a choice between a white woman benefiting from black prison labor (sic) and a white man campaigning on sending black people to prison”.