After the Civil War (1861-1865), President Abraham Lincoln passed the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude and establishing the emancipation of enslaved Black people. The 14th and 15th Amendments granted African Americans citizenship and permitted African American men the right to vote, respectively. In the postwar Reconstruction era (circa 1865-1877), one of many unanswered questions remained: How might free or freed African Americans enjoy economic freedom without being granted a parcel of land? Although slavery was dismantled formally on the national level, white plantation owners were still in possession of their vast farms and the supplies held over from the days of slave labor. A new labor system propagated in the South that accounted for landowners’ lack of cash and freed Black people’s lack of resources to live independent lives. Black sharecroppers worked land that was formerly worked by enslaved people and lived in cabins rented to them by their employers. Sharecroppers were often overwhelmed by debt as they paid their employer the allotted portion of their yield and kept the remainder of their crop for their own sustenance.

In 1865 and 1866, following the abolition of slavery, southern states began to enact Black Codes, laws that asked and answered the question: How much freedom should African Americans be apportioned? In practice, law enforcement officers and judges in the South upheld the codes, which included labor contract laws and apprenticeship laws that saw minors performing forced labor on plantations without pay.