Through the convict lease system, Black people were forced to play the same old roles carved out for them by slavery.
Men and women alike were arrested and imprisoned at the slightest pretext-in order to be leased out by the authorities as convict laborers.
Whereas the slaveholders had recognized limits to the cruelty with which they exploited their "valuable" human property, no such cautions were necessary for the postwar planters who rented Black convicts for
relatively short terms. "In many cases sick convicts are made to toil until they drop dead in their tracks.”
📛4 Using slavery as its model, the convict lease system did not discriminate between male and female labor.
Men and women were frequently housed together in the same stockade and were yoked together during the workday. In a resolution passed by the 1883
Texas State Convention of Negroes, "the practice of yoking or chaining male and female convicts together" was "strongly condemned."
📛5 Likewise, at the Founding Convention of the Afro-American League in 1890, one of the seven reasons motivating the
creation of this organization was "(t)he odious and demoralizing penitentiary system of the South, its chain gangs, convict leases and
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