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Sharecropping is not slavery
but it did become,

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for an enormous population of people,
forced labor.

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And I think that 
splitting hairs

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about what's slavery, 
what's involuntary servitude,

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what's forced labor 
is a distracting exercise.

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The reality is, millions of black people
in remote parts of the South

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could not leave the farms
they were being held on.

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If they did, they were subject
to arrest by the sheriff

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and, if they were arrested, 
they would then be returned

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to the very same farms, oftentimes,
in chains, receiving nothing.

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That is slavery. 
That's a form of slavery.

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But, the criminal justice system 
and the use of the courts

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to force African-Americans
back into labor

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was only one element of the new kind 
of slavery that soon pervaded the South.

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Sharecropping began, for instance,
as a form of free labor

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in which a farmer would go to work--
would work a portion of the land

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owned by another man
in return for a share of the crop.

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But the laws that were
being passed by the South

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and the threat of being arrested 
and forced into a much more terrible

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kind of penalty in a coal mine
or on a prison farm somewhere.

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The threat of having that happen 
to any African-American man

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meant that he could not defy
the wishes of the white landowner

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where he was working. Again and again, 
for millions of African-Americans

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working as sharecroppers, they and 
their families were as effectively held

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and immobilized on those farms,
in the 1890s and into the 1900s,

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as their grandparents had been 
held as slaves in the same places

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before the Civil War.

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Almost all sharecroppers were 
never able to pay back the debts

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to the landowners on 
whose land they worked.

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They effectively were peons, even though
they were not called that at the time.