Second Slavery

The term “Second Slavery” is used to describe slavery after its formal abolition. The Civil Rights Act 1866 and 14th Amendment,which had given blacks full citizenship, was not enforced. During this time, "black, orphaned children were branded 'criminals' and forced to labor", blacks were terrorized by the threat of lynching violence, and they were forced into sharecropping.

The Black Codes were the loophole to the laws that had been passed. Restrictive laws were put in place to limit the freedom of African Americans. The blacks would then be a cheap labor force that was made to work in to pay off their "debt" to their owner in order to become free, or at least that was what was said. Between the size of the supposed debt and the minuscule amount of their wages, these African American people were never going to be free in most cases. Add to that blacks being seen as "aggressive and violent" by whites and many of them end up in prison, or worse lynched.

Lynching was "defended as a necessary tactic to protect white southerners from black ‘criminals’." Throughout the era of second slavery, 9 million blacks were terrorized by the threat of lynching violence. From 1880 to 1940, 4,000 African Americans would be killed in racial territory lynchings alone. Lynching is labeled as "America's shame".

”Racial terror lynchings shaped the geographic, political, social and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that remain evident today.”