Post-slavery labor exploitation criminalized black unemployment to force unpaid work

Evidence

The failed effort to provide land to newly freed families was followed by 150-plus years of exploiting black labor and building white wealth, via different means. You could work for your former enslavers under onerous “sharecropping” agreements that made them rich and kept you poor. If you refused, your unemployment would make you guilty of the crime of “vagrancy” and allow you to be locked up and “leased” to individuals, small businesses, and large companies like U.S. Steel to work for no pay. Blackness was criminalized. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 46

Categorization

• XREF: The vagrancy-to-convict-lease chain directly feeds the mass-incarceration origins literature (c.f. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow reading list) — connects to: Gig-economy liberation rhetoric masks new and deeper labor exploitation — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 225; Rushdoony equated welfare-state programs with slavery of Black Americans. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 461; Vagrancy laws effectively criminalized male unemployment and homelessness — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3285 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Supplies the historical paper trail for the reparations SAC article on the continuity after the thirteenth amendment.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 46