Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/214

6 through that most American of means forced Blackblack [sic] people into sharecropping roles, where they somehow always tended to find themselves in debt to the landowner when the growing season closed, with no hope of recourse against the ever-present cooking of the books.

Sharecropping is but one example of race-linked obstacles that the law (and private parties) laid down to hinder the progress and prosperity of Blackblack [sic] people. Vagrancy laws criminalized free Blackblack [sic] men who failed to work for Whitewhite [sic] landlords. Many States barred freedmen from hunting or fishing to ensure that they could not live without entering de facto reenslavement as sharecroppers. A cornucopia of laws (e.g., banning hitchhiking, prohibiting encouraging a laborer to leave his employer, and penalizing those who prompted Blackblack [sic] southerners to migrate northward) ensured that Blackblack [sic] people could not freely seek better lives elsewhere. And when statutes did not ensure compliance, state-sanctioned (and private) violence did.

Thus emerged Jim Crow—a system that was, as much as anything else, a comprehensive scheme of economic exploitation to replace the Black Codes, which themselves had replaced slavery’s form of comprehensive economic exploitation. Meanwhile, as Jim Crow ossified, the Federal