Flagler's developments in Florida were built using cheap labor that exploited people in the systems of convict leasing and debt peonage used in the South for 50 years after the civil war."Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Flagler, like many white industrialists across the South, leased African American convict labor from the state. Convicts extended his Florida East Coast Railway (FECR) from West Palm Beach to Miami, cleared the land for his Royal Palm Hotel in Miami and graded the rail lines running from the mainland to his FECR extension across the Keys... Flagler and Florida were not aberrations. Convict lease laws in almost every Southern state essentially criminalized blackness, providing a means for authorities to arrest freed people for pseudo-crimes like vagrancy, lease them to private companies and force their labor...