After the Civil War, the South’s economy, society, and government were in shambles. Southern state governments struggled to raise money to repair damaged infrastructure and to support new expenses ...

More than 150 years ago, a prison complex known as the Lone Rock stockade operated at one of the biggest coal mines in Tennessee. It was powered largely by African American men who had been arrested ...

Archaeologists recently discovered a historic cemetery in Fort Bend County, reopening an often forgotten chapter in Texas history: How the state forced mostly black prisoners to work in plantations ...

Gaping wide like gateways to the center of the earth, the coke furnaces along Lake Road in South Cumberland State Park stand as remnants of what was once Tennessee’s most productive coal mining ...

ATLANTA (AP) — The City of Atlanta's official seal shows a phoenix rising from the ashes of the Civil War. What it doesn’t show is that Atlanta was rebuilt with slavery’s successor: convict labor, ...

After poring through thousands of records, a Rice University researcher claims there are now nearly 300 victims of the convict-leasing program who died in Sugar Land and are possibly buried in the ...

Prison inmates are picking fruits and vegetables at a rate not seen since Jim Crow. Convict leasing for agriculture – a system that allows states to sell prison labor to private farms – became ...

Like much of the rest of the discourse around jails, prisons and mass incarceration, Black History Month is not usually a time when we talk about the thousands of black prisoners that were forced to ...