Also, in every Southern state it was against the law for African-Americans to sell their crops after dark. For example, vagrancy statutes made it a crime for any person to be unable to prove at any given moment that he was employed. What types of “crimes” could African-Americans be charged with?Īfter the Civil War, all of the Southern states passed a series of laws, which were designed primarily to criminalize black life. This was the means by which the white South forced millions of other African-Americans to go along with de facto slavery that took on the form of sharecropping, abusive farm tenancy, land renting and labor contracts. One part of neoslavery, “convict leasing,” was the sentencing of prisoners to hard labor or to fine them outrageously, and they were leased out to commercial interests such as farms, coal mines, turpentine production plants, lumber and railroad camps. Neoslavery is a term to describe a whole range of ways in which all across the Southern United States in the late 19th century and deep into the 20th century millions of African-Americans found themselves in a form of de facto slavery and involuntary servitude. Blackmon, author of Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, is interviewed in Newsweek this week:Ĭan you explain the concept of “neoslavery” and the “convict labor system”?
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