From the time of the Civil War until almost the beginning of World War II, long after slavery had been abolished in our country, thousands of black men, perhaps as many as 200,000 altogether over the years, were routinely arrested in the South for “crimes” as trivial as changing jobs without permission or talking loudly in the presence of white women. Once arrested and hurriedly convicted, these men, who could not afford to pay the fines and fees with which they’d been charged, were sentenced to hard labor and “leased” to American companies, most notably US Steel, to work in mines or factories for no pay often for the rest of their lives.

So reports Douglas A. Blackmon, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and bureau chief, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book. In painstaking detail, Blackmon chronicles how such abuses occurred most often at times when cheap—almost free—labor was most needed, not at all in relation to the amount of actual crime committed. That such a system could thrive at the same time the country celebrated the growing independence and self-reliance of blacks in America freed from the yoke of slavery defies reason and strains belief. But, as is so often the case, where there is monetary gain to be had from pursuing an illogical or unreasonable course of action, we find people acting counterintuitively.

An excerpt from the introduction to Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II:

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.”1 Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.

After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham’s sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.

The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham’s fine and fees. What the company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.

I urge you to follow the link to the author’s homepage and read the rest of the excerpt there.