Criminalizing labor contract breaches forced freed Black people back into quasi-slavery.

Evidence

The campaigns of white terror that marked the period after Reconstruction, known as Redemption, once again guaranteed an exploitable, dependent labor force for the white South. Most Black Southerners had no desire to work on the same forced-labor camps where they had just been enslaved. But white Southerners passed state laws that made it a crime if they didn’t sign labor contracts with white landowners or if they changed employers without permission or sold cotton after sunset. As punishment for these “crimes,” Black people were arrested and then forcibly leased out to companies and individuals. While white Northerners largely turned a blind eye, white Southerners compelled Black people back into quasi-slavery through sharecropping and convict leasing. This arrangement ensured that once-devastated towns like my father’s hometown, Greenwood, Mississippi, could again call themselves the cotton capitals of the world, and companies like United States Steel secured a steady supply of unfree Black laborers who could be worked to death, in what Douglas A. Blackmon calls “slavery by another name.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1355

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reframing-vs-peripheral thesis: convict leasing as post-abolition continuation of slavery, echoing the book’s core argument that emancipation didn’t end the system.