Since the 1619 arrival of the first slave ship in Port Comfort, Virginia, European Americans regularly kidnapped people from Africa, forcing them into slavery in the United States. They were forced to work the land, growing cotton and other agricultural goods for the enrichment of those who had bought them. Enslaved Africans and their descendants were not compensated for their work, receiving instead torture, rape, and mistreatment in an institution that viewed dark skin as an indication of a lack of humanity.

When slavery was abolished at the end of the Civil War, the population of enslaved workers had few skills or resources with which to survive. They had been forbidden from reading or receiving an education as enslaved people. Plantation owners hired former enslaved people in a new sharecropping system that promised land for work but drove former enslaved people back into forced labor through unpayable debts. Free Black men and women were given an opportunity to “buy their freedom” but ultimately found themselves in a new form of slavery that lasted long after it had officially ended. Many states’ vagrancy laws allowed communities to capture Black people off the streets and force them to work in fields or factories to pay off egregious legal fines.