The cruel convict leasing system that re-enslaved countless Black people after Emancipation
3 years
A Black man named Green Cottenham was on March 30, 1908, arrested and charged with “vagrancy” in Shelby County, Alabama. Vagrancy, which was the inability to prove employment when demanded by authorities, was an offense created at the end of the Reconstruction Period and was almost exclusively for Black men. As Douglas A. Blackmon’s 2008...
