Final answer:
Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans in Confederate states primarily worked as sharecroppers or in agriculture on plantations. They faced significant challenges such as racial injustice, lack of land ownership opportunities, and efforts to exploit their labor that echoed the conditions of slavery. This struggle for fair treatment and equality in labor continued long after the Civil War.
Step-by-step explanation:
After the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War, the role of African Americans in the Confederate states continued to focus on various forms of labor. Despite the legal end of slavery, racial injustice persisted and African American workers found themselves largely occupied with jobs in the agricultural sector, such as plantations, although now nominally as free tenants or sharecroppers. The task system and other forms of labor organisation, which had been deeply embedded in the experience of enslaved African life, continued to influence the work assignments in post-war South.
Even after the war, the Republican Reconstruction program aimed at guaranteeing black rights, but this vision was undermined by consistent racism and violence in the South. African Americans struggled to acquire their own land and were coerced into signing labor contracts that sometimes resembled the conditions they faced during enslavement. The convict-lease system and vagrancy laws continued to restrict the freedom of African Americans and enabled a new form of bound labor that persisted well into the 20th century. Many African Americans also combated post-war attempts to place them and their children into unpaid labor positions or unfair working conditions. The end of legal slavery did not equate to an end of exploitation or the fight for equitable treatment and opportunities in the workforce.