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SO MANY PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW THIS… They be like “Black oppression was a verY LONG LONG LONG TIME AGO” … honestly stfu

LONG HISTORY RANT: That timeline should also include “convict labor, sharecropping, peonage and Black Codes” where only “segregation” is. While peonage was technically illegal, all were devised to wring as much profit out of Black labor as a white business owner could get away with. The Black Codes ensured that everything short of working very hard for a white business owner and getting little pay could be punishable by long sentences of– you guessed it, years of hard labor for a white business owner. Sharecroppers were tied to the land for debts that swelled according to the revenues, ensuring that there would never be enough in one season to pay up and be free to leave. My great-grandmother smuggled her children North to escape sharecropping, but she could never make enough to free my great-grandfather until he was too weak to make the journey. And that’s not counting the outright kidnapping and enslavement of legally free persons within the U.S. after the Civil War, which while illegal, the enforcement of which depended upon the enslaved person escaping and reporting their case to federal authorities.