White American stereotypes of black Americans as lazy and violent derive from the very beginning of the United States, where these attributes were regularly used to justify the enslavement of America’s black population. After slavery, these stereotypes were used to justify the equally brutal practice of convict leasing, whereby large portions of the black population of the formerly antebellum South were arrested for petty crimes and leased to iron, steel, and coal companies for hard labor, often with fatal consequences.
