Law and violence jointly enforced lucrative debt peonage on black farmers

Evidence

Sharecropping was designed to produce a “system of debt peonage” in which “insolvent croppers unable to repay debts from one year to another were required by law to work indefinitely for the same unscrupulous planter.” If a black farmer questioned what they were owed, they could wind up dead. But they would not wind up with more money. If a farmer left before the end of their annual contract, they would forfeit any right to future profits. Meanwhile, those who were able to get work in town as domestic servants and janitors—jobs white people generally avoided—were paid measly wages. Hiring black workers who could be paid less than their white peers benefited white employers. These contracts were unfair but legally valid. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 272

Categorization

• XREF: The point that contracts were ‘unfair but legally valid’ prefigures the legal-brief argument Brown will build — legal validity does not preclude remedy.