Post-emancipation legal systems funneled freed blacks into prison labor and racial violence.

Evidence

Those who refused to sign sharecropping agreements could be arrested for vagrancy and, like Green Cottenham, sent to prison, where their forced labor enriched the state and companies like U.S. Steel in the convict leasing system. If they were lucky, free blacks might open their own business, as Tommie Moss did, and become successful, but that increased the likelihood of facing mob violence egged on by a threatened white competitor. Black people could not escape their blackness. There was nowhere a black person could go, even though slavery was ended, to be free and experience the type of freedom known to white men. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 588

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The downward spiral from refusing sharecropping to vagrancy arrest to convict leasing (Green Cottenham) is a genuinely dramatic narrative arc — usable as the spine of a historical story.