Some people look at the conditions Black communities live in today — the poverty, the neighborhoods, the schools — and say: “Yeah… slavery was bad. But all of this? This can’t still be about that.” They talk as if racial terror was incidental, as if the Black Codes just happened, as if convict leasing and Jim Crow were historical footnotes. They speak as though lynching, redlining, segregation, and mass incarceration were unfortunate patterns, not the result of deliberate policy. As if no one built this. As if no one meant for it to be this way.
But what if they did?
What if the systems that followed slavery weren’t accidents, but designs? What if the suffering we see today was structured through law, enforced by courts, reinforced by profit, and accepted by the public? This series is about that truth. About how injustice against Black people in this country wasn’t just allowed — it was engineered. It was enforced. And in many cases, it was celebrated.
It was injustice by design. That’s the name of this series. And every story we tell will prove the same thing: Injustice wasn’t a failure. Injustice wasn’t a malfunction. Injustice was the system.
A Story They Tried to Bury
In 1922, a Black man named Ned Thompson was arrested in Tallahassee, Florida.
Just months later, a white man named Martin Tabert died in the same county — in the same labor camp — under the same system.
The deaths of these two men weren’t accidents. They were outcomes of a machine.
This is part of a broader series that documents the afterlife of slavery — how states like Florida continued to extract Black labor and dispose of Black lives through the criminal legal system.
This story doesn’t begin with Ned’s arrest. It begins with what Florida did — and didn’t do — after the Civil War.
Convict Leasing: Slavery by Another Name
When slavery legally ended in 1865, Florida didn’t dismantle the system that had powered its economy. It simply gave it new language — and created new laws to sustain it.
That same year, Florida’s provisional governor called for a return to plantation labor and passed new statutes to control Black freedom. These became the Florida Black Codes.
Black men could be arrested for vagrancy, for “not working,” or for being out of place. And once arrested, the state could lease them out — renting their labor to private companies like lumber mills and turpentine camps.
This was convict leasing: a system that turned jails into marketplaces. It criminalized Black existence, funneled men into labor camps, and monetized their captivity.
By the early 1900s, counties across Florida were profiting from the bodies of the very people slavery had once enslaved.
Ned Thompson: A Legacy and a Target
Ned Thompson’s story is rooted in that history. He was born into a Black family in Leon County that had once been enslaved on local plantations. He lived in the shadow of that past — and under a system that never truly ended.
In October 1922, he was arrested under a “peace warrant” — a charge used in the post-slavery South to detain Black men preemptively, without evidence of a crime. There was no trial. No conviction. Just arrest, detention, and then extraction.
The sheriff’s office had recently signed a deal with the Putnam Lumber Company. They would receive $20 for every man leased to the labor camp. Before the contract, Leon County had just 20 men in jail. After it, they had 154.
Ned Thompson was among them.
Leased, Beaten, and Killed
Once transferred to the camp, Ned was placed under the supervision of a white whipping boss named Thomas Walter Higginbotham. Higginbotham was full of rage, hatred, and savagery. He used a leather strap, four inches wide, seven and a half pounds heavy, to beat men into submission.
Ned was sixty-four years old. And sixty-four then was not sixty-four now. This was a sixty-four that had carried slavery. A sixty-four that had lived through the Klan, through Reconstruction, through Jim Crow. For Black people in that time, life expectancy was far lower. Sixty-four could have easily been eighty-four.
Here he was, an old man’s body, forced to endure the brutality of this labor camp. And it was in that state that Higginbotham came for him. Because Ned wasn’t working fast enough. And for Higginbotham, that was reason enough. So the whip came down. That leather strap, four inches wide, seven and a half pounds heavy, came crashing across Ned’s back. And here he was, an old man’s body, forced to endure the brutality of the camp. Between each strike, Higginbotham would drag that strap through sand or sugar. Sand turned the leather into an abrasive, so that every blow didn’t just strike — it tore. Sugar cut like tiny blades, and when it pressed into the wounds, it burned like fire.
After the beating, Ned could not work. Higginbotham had broken him. His body — physically — could not go anymore. And in that camp, if you could not work, you were no good. So Ned was taken back to jail. Because if a man was too sick or too fragile to work, he was made to simply sit in the cell until he recovered enough to be sent back. But Ned did not get better. With each passing day, he grew worse. His body began to shut down. His strength failed. His life was slipping away. And sometime in October or November of 1921, Ned Thompson died in the Leon County jail.
Martin Tabert: When Whiteness Made It News
Three months later, that same labor camp received another prisoner. His name was Martin Tabert — a 22-year-old white man from North Dakota. He had been traveling through the South and was arrested in Tallahassee for vagrancy — a nearly identical charge to Ned’s.
When he couldn’t pay the fine, he too was leased to Putnam Lumber. And just like Ned, he was beaten by Thomas Walter Higginbotham.
But Martin’s death was not ignored. Because Martin was white. And because Martin had a family with access to political power. When they learned he had died, they demanded answers.
A White Death That Brought a Black Death to Light
News outlets picked up the story. The governor ordered an investigation. Senators held hearings. It was only through the reporting on Martin Tabert’s death that the public learned Ned Thompson had died at the hands of the same man. Two men had been killed. But only one death was treated as injustice.
The other had been invisible — until whiteness made it legible.
Florida Abolished the System — But Not Because of Ned
The public outrage surrounding Martin’s death forced Florida to act. In May 1923, the state abolished county convict leasing.
But it wasn’t justice that moved them. It was embarrassment. Martin Tabert’s death threatened Florida’s national image. Ned Thompson’s death never even reached the papers.
Florida didn’t end the system because Black men had been tortured. It ended the system because a white man had been killed.
Who Gets Remembered?
Ned Thompson’s name was nearly erased from the public record. There was no funeral in the press. No editorial in his honor. No state apology. He was one of hundreds — maybe thousands — of Black men brutalized by the convict leasing machine.
But when Martin Tabert died, the world paused.
This Memory Justice Project exists so we don’t keep repeating that pattern. So that memory doesn’t depend on race. So that justice doesn’t depend on access. So that the men who were forgotten aren’t forgotten again.
Because memory is a form of justice. And justice demands that we tell the whole truth.
