Since the 1619 Project’s release, proponents of free markets have rightly pushed back on the claim that American capitalism is irrevocably linked to racism and slavery. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Henderson and Phil Magness demonstrate that most of the injustice that was presented in episode three of the 1619 Project’s Hulu docuseries was perpetrated by governments, and was not the product of market capitalism. In fact, with the release of Black Liberation Through the Marketplace (which Marcus co-authored with Rachel Ferguson) it is obvious to us that many of the greatest atrocities committed against black Americans are the product of government policy – including perhaps the most egregious: convict leasing. 

We have spent the last two years doing a deep dive into the convict leasing system in Alabama from its inception following the Civil War to its repeal in 1928. What we discovered was a corporatist scheme in which state governments partnered with private business to increase revenues, increase profits, and industrialize the South while criminalizing blackness and restoring (to the extent that they could) the racial hierarchies of the Antebellum South. Unlike capitalism (or free enterprise), which encourages competition in the market with minimum government intervention, corporatism is a system whereby the state picks winners and losers by granting subsidies, granting special privileges, or by establishing regulations that develop cartels within industries.