Yes, thanks for bringing this up. I don't think it was much hidden though in the South, only from the North and West. In the South where 91 percent of black Americans lived, it was called Sharecropping or domestic work. Laws and black codes were written and enforced in Southern states that allowed black Americans to be arrested for "loitering" or being lazy, and many trivial offenses. They then could legally enslaved through the loophole in the 13th amendment.
Most slavercropping or neoslavery took place in agriculture and as domestic servants and were bound by contracts and debt from being paid their share of the crop in terms of high interest loans from the company story on the plantation (what today is called payday loans). Senator Jim Eastland of Mississippi owned a working cotton plantation with slaves or "sharecroppers" on it in the 1960s and 70s and was one of the few Democrats who did not quit the party in 1964 and go the Republican Party when LBJ the "traitor" betrayed them and signed the civil rights act. This avowed segregationist Eastland gave his endorsement to Jimmy Carter. He was evil--there's no other word for keeping slaves in the 1960s.
Fannie Lou Hammer left one plantation in Mississippi in 1962 when civil rights workers "recused" her and some colleagues and said on camera that she did even know blacks could vote. The only thing hidden about it is that it's not in the history books. As someone who grew up in the North, I didn't encounter this history at all.
In fact, the Democrats were the racist bigot party before 1964. They combed through every piece of New Deal legislation to make sure none of it benefited southern blacks or "agricultural workers" or "domestic workers", of which was over 75%. Blacks were locked out of unions in the South, Social Security, voting, everything. The New Deal I've discovered was the "New White Deal". Honestly, after reading the history, I feel betrayed. FDR was no saint and head of the bigot party, the "solid South." Southerners considered FDR one of them, and rightly so. He had segregated the navy under President Wilson to show his allegiance to the "empire of the South."
So, you're correct, but far more than you realize.
