Free Black people were legally presumed fugitive slaves across many states

Evidence

Even emancipated and free-born Black people were often considered to be presumptive fugitives to be hunted, captured, and sold into slavery. As one nineteenth-century court ruled, “The presumption arising from the color of a person indicating African descent is, that he is a slave.” Some Northern states and territories, including Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon, banned the immigration of free Black people; some Southern states required that enslaved people who obtained freedom from their enslavers leave the state, to avoid any confusion about what Black people represented in American society. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 844

Categorization

• SEED: The legal presumption that Blackness itself indicated slave status is a striking case study for an essay on how presumptions encode design decisions in legal systems.
• XREF: connects to: New York honored slave-state property rights even after abolishing slavery in 1827 — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 39; Free northern Blacks faced kidnapping into slavery despite legal prohibitions — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 499