Most the enslaved are black, you are correct. The 13th amendment gave the permission for legislatures to make laws to lease up convicts or felons. State laws in the South immediately made laws to make “vagrancy” and other perceived slights a crime, like not carrying ID. The white controlled legislature in 1865 in Mississippi passed such a law that explicitly said “negroes” could be arrested and then auctioned off “on call” by the local sheriff if the negro could not pay the fine. The fine was about $1,800 in today’s money and of course new freed slaves had none. Any “white man” could then come “on call” to pay the fine, which was then a bond for one year to work off the labor, usually at a cotton plantation. In 1868 many of those states were forced to take the word “negro” or mention of race out of those vagrancy laws, but every white sheriff knew who to arrest and white owners learned quickly to pay the bonds that made the negro enslaved to work off that fine. Many were rearrested of of course.The railroads and coal companies designed leases with the states for as much of this enslaved convict labor (black Americans) as they could get, and by the 1890s in states like Alabama when one coal company took all the leases from the state, the competitor went to the county governments in the black belt to lease the enslaved convicts from the sheriffs, who of course were incentives to go out and arrest blacks who were loitering or “expectorating” (seriously). In this way, it became routine to arrest black Americans for minor infractions, since the state and county governments earned tax income and needed hard currency or cash for the leases developed from the arrests. During the close of the century, Alabama for example got about 75 percent of its tax revenue from the leasing program, according to the author of “Slavery by Another Name.” in 1860, the states got about 40-45 percent of tax revenue from the property value of slaves. In that way, whites schools were built on renting out black convict labor, with no irony of course since the practice was “natural” already.
