A Glimpse of Black History in U.S.A

[image error] (Pic.Juvenile convicts at work in the fields, 1903. Library of Congress/John L. Spivak)

What happened after slavery in the United States was abolished in 1865

Here’s how it worked. Black men – and sometimes women and children – were arrested and convicted for crimes enumerated in the Black Codes, state laws criminalizing petty offenses and aimed at keeping freed people tied to their former owners’ plantations and farms.

The most sinister crime was vagrancy – the “crime” of being unemployed – which brought a large fine that few blacks could afford to pay.

Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the region’s untapped natural resources. As many as were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged and sexually violated. They died by the thousands from injury, disease and torture. Courtesy: The Conversation

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