Slavery shape-shifted into sharecropping and convict leasing enforced by lynching.

Evidence

Once chattel slavery ended, slavery shape-shifted, first into sharecropping and convict leasing, with the threat of lynching as the enforcement. As John Hope Franklin quoted from the Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction’s Report, there was “a disposition on the part of [white] citizens to secure, as far as possible, the same control over the freedmen by contracts which [the whites] possessed when they held them as slaves.” Some freedmen were forced to sign sharecropping agreements that allowed them to cultivate other people’s land in exchange for a share in the profits after the crops were sold and expenses deducted. More often than not, there were no profits after their landlords—who were usually white and oftentimes former enslavers—completed their creative bookkeeping. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 271

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the ‘slavery shape-shifted’ mechanism that anchors the saturated-system harm claim — the legal transition from chattel to contract-based control.