Prosperous free black people still faced vigilante violence and enslavement

Evidence

However, as with many other prosperous black people, Robert Harlan’s mixed-race family was constantly at risk of being attacked by local gangs of white vigilantes who targeted black businessmen and white abolitionists. … Brimming with self-confidence, he believed he could make a success of it, but he could not “risk a long journey without proof of his freedom.” Despite his special privileges, he had lived his thirty-two years to date as an enslaved man. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 397

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the saturated-system framework — privilege did not shield Harlan from the structural threat of re-enslavement. Relevant to the argument about how even ‘exceptional’ Black success was contingent on white whim.