The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

then these economic policies are also important parts of the architecture of
de jure segregation.
I
UNTIL LONG after emancipation from slavery, most African Americans were
denied access to free labor markets and were unable to save from wages.
This denial of access was another badge of slavery that Congress was duty
bound to eliminate, not to perpetuate.
Following the Civil War, and intensifying after Reconstruction, a
sharecropping system of indentured servitude perpetuated aspects of the
slave system. After food and other living costs were deducted from their
earnings, sharecroppers typically owed plantation owners more than their
wages due. Local sheriffs enforced this peonage, preventing sharecroppers
from seeking work elsewhere, by arresting, assaulting, or murdering those
who attempted to leave, or by condoning violence perpetrated by owners.
In many instances, African Americans were arrested for petty and phony
offenses (like vagrancy if they came to town when off work), and when they
were unable to pay fines and court fees, wardens sometimes sold prisoners to
plantations, mines, and factories. Douglas Blackmon, in his book Slavery by
Another Name, estimates that from the end of Reconstruction until World
War II, the number enslaved in this way exceeded 100,000. Mines operated
by U.S. Steel alone used tens of thousands of imprisoned African
Americans. The practice ebbed during World War II, but it wasn’t until 1951
that Congress fulfilled its Thirteenth Amendment obligation and explicitly
outlawed the practice.
Some African Americans managed to escape to the North early in the
twentieth century, yet others were forcibly prevented or intimidated from
doing so. But during World War I, when immigration of unskilled Europeans
was sharply curtailed, northern manufacturers sent recruiters south. They
frequently traveled in disguise, pretending, for example, to be insurance
salesmen, to avoid capture by sheriffs. During this time, more than 600,000