
Fact check: Southern states used convict leasing to force Black people into unpaid labor
Fact check: Southern states used convict leasing to force Black people into unpaid labor
Editor’s note: In two former legal statutes referenced below, a racist term was replaced with the word Black in brackets.
The claim: Convict leasing, an example of systemic racism, was used to force Black people into unpaid labor for private and state industry.
Prior to the Juneteenth holiday commemorating the end of slavery, a now-unavailable Facebook post asserted that the convict leasing system used in