The Convict Leasing System: America's Hidden Slave Trade
After the Civil War ended in 1865, Southern states found a loophole in the 13th Amendment that allowed them to re-enslave hundreds of thousands of Black Americans through a system called convict leasing. Men were arrested for minor or fabricated crimes, then leased to private companies to work in coal mines, turpentine camps, and railroads under deadly conditions. The profits were massive. The death rates were staggering. And most Americans have never heard this story.
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Sources:
Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
Equal Justice Initiative. "Convict Leasing." https://eji.org/news/history-racial-i...
Mancini, Matthew J. One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
Oshinsky, David M. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: Free Press, 1996.
Library of Congress. "The Convict Leasing System: Slavery in its Worst Aspects." Inside Adams blog. https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/20...
Encyclopedia of Alabama. "Convict-Lease System." https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/art...
PBS. "Slavery by Another Name: Convict Leasing." https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-an...
Associated Press and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. "Locked Up: The prison labor that built business empires." September 2022.
Wikipedia. "Convict leasing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict...
Wikipedia. "Black Codes (United States)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_C...)