An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Still, Native people continued to suffer. Two policies undergirded “the
Indian Problem.” The first was the passing of the Dawes Act (also known
as the General Allotment Act) in 1887. Named after Massachusetts senator
Henry Dawes, the act, which began the process of parceling out American
Indian lands to whites, produced severe consequences. In 1887, tribal lands
occupied approximately 138 million acres; by 1934, they had dwindled to a
measly 52 million. In addition, as historian David Chang has argued, by
making lands private property, “allotment made it possible for Native
individuals to lose them through direct sales, defaulted mortgages, tax
forfeiture sales, and other means.” 3 The second policy that was damaging to
Native people stemmed from the Supreme Court’s 1903 decision in Lone
Wolf v. Hitchcock. The decision effectively gave Congress plenary power
over American Indian land rights, meaning that tribal nations would have
no control over their land.
As Indigenous peoples were losing their land and political power as
sovereign nations, Black Americans were experiencing extreme racial
violence. Black folks suffered much under Jim Crow racial terror during the
Progressive Era. Convict leasing, a system designed to preserve the
enslavement of Black people after their legal emancipation, was perhaps
one of the key sites of Black oppression and exploitation. Though slavery
was technically illegal, the Thirteenth Amendment allowed for the
enslavement of people who had been convicted of a crime. By purchasing
the labor of Black people from southern states, private companies would
receive free labor and the state would earn revenue. The convict leasing
system was an earlier iteration of the current prison industrial complex,
which legal scholar Michelle Alexander has aptly called the “new Jim
Crow.”
Historian Sarah Haley argues that convict leasing was also a gendered
experience. Although a minority, Black women suffered under the same
system. The state portrayed Black women as deviant in order to exploit
them for their labor; their gendered exploitation ushered in what she calls
“Jim Crow modernity.” 4 She argues that the development of white
supremacy during Jim Crow was manufactured through the creation of a
carceral state that exploited Black women by using state violence. While all
Black folks suffered under the convict leasing system, they also suffered
debt peonage and other forms of racial oppression.