The laws concerning vagrancy, also, were full of discriminations and in many cases assured to the white magistrates wide discretion in stamping blacks as vagrants, and assigning them to the highest bidder to work out fines. Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina furnished the most notorious features of this legislation. In Mississippi the freedmen could not own land, nor could they even rent it save in incorporated towns. A local ordinance in Louisiana required every negro to be in the regular service of “some white person, or former owner, who shall be held responsible for the conduct of
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