Convict leasing carried the same workforce seamlessly from slavery into railroad construction

Evidence

Convict leasing presented a seamless transition from slavery: “The same men who built railroads with thousands of slaves…were also the first to employ forced African American labor in the 1870s.” In Texas in 1867, for example, black Americans made up roughly one-third of those in the state penitentiary but almost 90 percent “of those leased out for railroad labor.” The threat of an arrest for vagrancy would hang over the head of any who did not want to enter into restrictive, one-sided sharecropping agreements. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 277

Categorization

• QUESTION: What are the specific numbers/fates for other southern states, to build a fuller state-by-state accounting ledger?