just as douglas blackmon described in "slavery by another name" -- >> a great book, by the way. >> a great book -- >> what happened to blacks after the civil war, how they were freed. >> right. the invention of convict leasing as a mechanism to -- i mean, they had many sources, but one was an economic project to rebuild the south on the backs of imprisoned, leased african americans sold to private industry. and the net simply widened, because there was a lot of money to be made in doing that kind of work. in douglas blackmon's work, we learn how elastic were laws like vagrancy laws, intended effectively to empower any citizen and/or law enforcement official to check the papers of a black person moving freely along the world. and if you couldn't prove that you were currently employed, bound to a tenant farming contract or a sharecropping agreement, then you were by definition a vagrant, by definition a criminal, and subject to, in this case, convict leasing. so if you're a sharecropper and you're being cheated by the white landowner. and you tell him to go to hell and you step away. h