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STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT 
AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 
JACKSON, J., dissenting 

through that most American of means forced Black 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.13 

Sharecropping is but one example of race-linked obstacles 
that the law (and private parties) laid down to hinder the 
progress  and  prosperity  of  Black  people.    Vagrancy  laws 
criminalized free Black men who failed to work for White 
landlords.14  Many States barred freedmen from hunting or 
fishing to ensure that they could not live without entering 
de facto reenslavement as sharecroppers.15  A cornucopia of 
laws (e.g., banning hitchhiking, prohibiting encouraging a 
laborer  to  leave  his  employer,  and  penalizing  those  who
prompted  Black  southerners  to  migrate  northward)  en-
sured  that  Black  people  could  not  freely  seek  better  lives 
elsewhere.16  And when statutes did not ensure compliance, 
state-sanctioned (and private) violence did.17 

Thus emerged Jim Crow—a system that was, as much as
anything else, a comprehensive scheme of economic exploi-
tation to replace the Black Codes, which themselves had re-
placed slavery’s form of comprehensive economic exploita-
tion.18    Meanwhile,  as  Jim  Crow  ossified,  the  Federal 

—————— 

13 R. Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Gov-
ernment Segregated America 154 (2017) (Rothstein); Baradaran 33–34; 
Wilkerson 53–55. 

14 Baradaran 20–21; Du Bois 173–179, 694–696, 698–699; R. Goluboff, 
The  Thirteenth  Amendment  and  the  Lost  Origins  of  Civil  Rights,  50
Duke  L. J.  1609,  1656–1659  (2001)  (Goluboff );  Wilkerson  152  (noting 
persistence of this practice “well into the 1940s”). 

15 Baradaran 20. 
16 Goluboff 1656–1659 (recounting presence of these practices well into 

the 20th century); Wilkerson 162–163. 

17 Rothstein 154. 
18 C. Black, The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions, 69 Yale L. J.

421, 424 (1960); Foner 47–48; Du Bois 179, 696; Baradaran 38–39.