Post-emancipation white employers weaponized the judicial system to restore black labor extraction.

Evidence

This travesty happened only because the judicial system was weaponized on behalf of white labor needs. The end of slavery meant white business owners could no longer extract free black labor, “so they turned to mass arrests making convict leasing popular and profitable.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 281

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to convict-leasing as a systemic mechanism in the broader saturated-system harm architecture central to Brown’s entire reparations argument; also parallels the Southern convict-labor dynamics described in studies of postbellum peonage. — connects to: Dispossessed white farmers fought land reform through courts, concessions, alliances, and memoirs — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 10