This Day in History: 1909-02-02

Police in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania raid the city’s Herron Hill neighborhood and arrest over 200 Black men for being unemployed. Officers charged Black men with vagrancy if they could not prove their employment status, resulting in mass arrests. The next day, city officials sent the arrested men to the workhouse and consigned them to forced labor. Beginning soon after Emancipation, vagrancy laws were among the discriminatory policies used to criminalize and re-enslave Black people. Though the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1865 and claimed to abolish enslavement in the country, a large loophole allowed this abuse to continue: the amendment’s language prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime.” The mass arrests in Pittsburgh are just one example of the way Black people were re-enslaved for decades after the “end” of slavery in America. Learn more.