https://theconversation.com/exploiting-black-labor-after-the-abolition-of-slavery-72482
Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the region's untapped natural resources. As many as 200,000 black Americans were forced into back-breaking

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/opinion/juneteenth-slavery-prison.html
Today, a majority of the 1.2 million Americans locked up in state and federal prisons work under duress in jobs that cover the entire spectrum, from cellblock cleaning to skilled manufacturing

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-02-07/exploiting-black-labor-after-the-abolition-of-slavery
As many as 200,000 black Americans were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/06/15/black-americans-mistrust-of-the-criminal-justice-system/
Views about the intentions of the U.S. criminal justice system have their roots in key events in the 20th century. In the convict-leasing and chain gang systems of the early 1900s, Black men were forced to build roads, bridges and ditches as part of their incarceration. This new infrastructure improved the business prospects of rural planters throughout the South.

https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-prison-labor/
Thousands of Black people were forced into a brutal system that historians have called "worse than slavery." By the middle of the 20th century, states abandoned convict leasing due to industrialization and political pressure and extended slavery through chain gangs and prison farms.

https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws
Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws—which existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968—were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/not-being-fully-free-toll-everyday-racism-black-americans-n1223641
Many posed and smiled. But when Corey Yeager, a black man and psychologist for the NBA's Detroit Pistons, approached with a group of young black men clad in T-shirts emblazoned with the words "I

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/californias-black-legislators-reparations-bills-rcna157717
The language now says a prison or jail "shall not punish" an incarcerated person for refusing a work assignment, and it notes that a prison or jail can still reward a prisoner for voluntarily

https://theconversation.com/how-the-experience-of-black-people-freed-from-slavery-set-a-pattern-for-african-americans-today-167932
Black people live under a dual criminal justice system that subjects them to heavier policing, racially biased stops, searches and seizures, imprisonment, violence, and even death at the hands of

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/31/black-workers-views-and-experiences-in-the-us-labor-force-stand-out-in-key-ways/
Black workers generally earn less than U.S. workers overall, according to BLS data from 2022. Among full-time wage and salary workers, the median weekly earnings for Black workers ages 16 and older are $878, compared with $1,059 for all U.S. workers in the same age group. Among workers of other races and ethnicities in the same age group, the

https://www.learningforjustice.org/podcasts/teaching-hard-history/jim-crow-era/criminalizing-blackness-prisons-police-and-jim-crow
Episode 15, Season 4 After emancipation, aspects of the legal system were reshaped to maintain control of Black lives and labor. Historian Robert T. Chase outlines the evolution of convict leasing in the prison system. And Historian Brandon T. Jett explores the commercial factors behind the transition from extra-legal lynchings to police enforcement of the color line. We examine the

https://www.yahoo.com/news/white-west-virginia-couple-accused-011445671.html
The two children in the barn, aged 14 and 16, said they'd been locked inside for about 12 hours when they were found and were forced to sleep on the bare concrete floor according to the indictment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/us/grave-convict-lease-texas.html
By Sarah Mervosh. July 18, 2018. The remains of dozens of people found at a construction site in Texas this year are most likely those of African-Americans who were forced to work on a plantation

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0023656X.2019.1649377
There, runaway slaves joined free African Americans of whom many were undocumented residents of their states. This 'undocumentedness' placed them in a liminal status between free and unfree. Over the decades, black people were pushed into even more exploitative working conditions and labored at the lowest end of the urban labor markets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk37jXlnNnY
Phillip Scott reports on a newspaper article from 10/2/1918 out of Greenville, South Carolina. Them folks were upset that Black women didn't want to work for

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj7781
Moreover, historical research has shown that Black Americans were far more likely than white Americans to be punished by incarceration when the demand for their labor was low (15, 22, 24, 29). The boll weevil infestation in Georgia increased the Black prison admission rate for property crimes by more than a third ( 14 ).

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html
The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a "slave" race. This made them inferior to

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-060520-033306
This review synthesizes the historical literature on the criminalization and incarceration of black Americans for an interdisciplinary audience. Drawing on key insights from new histories in the field of American carceral studies, we trace the multifaceted ways in which policymakers and officials at all levels of government have used criminal law, policing, and imprisonment as proxies for

https://time.com/5738826/mass-incarceration-history/
Launched in the 1980s, the war on drugs and the emergence of private, for-profit prison systems led to the imprisonment of many minorities. Other scholarship has shown that the modern mass

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/12/03/the-growing-racial-disparity-in-prison-time
By Weihua Li. The racial disparity between black and white people sent to state prisons is declining, and it has been for some time. But criminal justice researchers say people of all races still aren't treated equally when it comes to one important measure: time served behind bars. While arrest and prison admission rates are dropping for

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2023/05/racial-disparities-persist-in-many-us-jails
Black people were overrepresented in most jails with relevant data. In 2022, Black people made up 12% of the local populations but 26% of the jail populations on average across the 595 jails from the JDI sample for which race data was available for the entire year. Of these jails, in almost 71% (421), the share of the jail population that was

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/black-to-the-future/tolerance-for-violence/
A History of Tolerance for Violence Has Laid the Groundwork for Injustice Today. We are living in America's era of mass incarceration. With just 5 percent of the world's population, this nation holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners—and many more people impacted by its crime policies. More than 2.1 million Americans are incarcerated

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/prison-industrial-complex-slavery-racism.html
Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our criminal-justice system. By Bryan Stevenson AUG. 14, 2019. Several years ago, my law office

https://newsone.com/5334877/whitefeather-white-west-virginia-couple-accused-black-children-slave-labor-bond-increase/
The children also said they were forced to sleep on the concrete floor of the shed without any mattress or padding. Court documents stated that the 14-year-old boy had "open sores on his bare

https://innocenceproject.org/african-american-wrongful-convictions-throughout-history/
Cross-racial misidentifications, forced confessions, all-white juries, and blatant racism led to the wrongful convictions of countless innocent black people. Between the 1870's and 1960's, a significant number of black defendant/ white victim allegations never made it to trial. The Tuskegee Institute Archive estimates approximately 3,500

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-06-26/a-us-journalist-goes-on-trial-in-russia-on-espionage-charges-that-he-and-his-employer-deny
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has gone on trial in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on espionage charges that he and others deny.

https://odysee.com/black-americans-were-forced-to-work-for:88b78b19a47c83404fb1e3f4a3de1436081f43a0
Account functions will be unavailable. Try again in a bit. Phillip Scott reports on a newspaper article from 10/2/1918 out of Greenville, South Carolina. Them folks were upset that Black women didn't want to work for them. They made a law forcing Black women