Jackson, J., dissenting
through that most American of means forced Black people into sharecropping roles, where they somehow always tended to find themselves in debt to the landowner when the growing season closed, with no hope of recourse against the ever-present cooking of the books.[1]
Sharecropping is but one example of race-linked obstacles that the law (and private parties) laid down to hinder the progress and prosperity of Black people. Vagrancy laws criminalized free Black men who failed to work for White landlords.[2] Many States barred freedmen from hunting or fishing to ensure that they could not live without entering de facto reenslavement as sharecroppers.[3] A cornucopia of laws (e.g., banning hitchhiking, prohibiting encouraging a laborer to leave his employer, and penalizing those who prompted Black southerners to migrate northward) ensured that Black people could not freely seek better lives elsewhere.[4] And when statutes did not ensure compliance, state-sanctioned (and private) violence did.[5]
Thus emerged Jim Crow—a system that was, as much as anything else, a comprehensive scheme of economic exploitation to replace the Black Codes, which themselves had replaced slavery’s form of comprehensive economic exploitation.[6] Meanwhile, as Jim Crow ossified, the Federal
- ↑ R. Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America 154 (2017) (Rothstein); Baradaran 33–34; Wilkerson 53–55.
- ↑ Baradaran 20–21; Du Bois 173–179, 694–696, 698–699; R. Goluboff, The Thirteenth Amendment and the Lost Origins of Civil Rights, 50 Duke L. J. 1609, 1656–1659 (2001) (Goluboff); Wilkerson 152 (noting persistence of this practice “well into the 1940s”).
- ↑ Baradaran 20.
- ↑ Goluboff 1656–1659 (recounting presence of these practices well into the 20th century); Wilkerson 162–163.
- ↑ Rothstein 154.
- ↑ C. Black, The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions, 69 Yale L. J. 421, 424 (1960); Foner 47–48; Du Bois 179, 696; Baradaran 38–39.
