Black Codes And Jim Crow

The following historical narration was pulled from (History​.com) in totality.
Thanks for your indulgence. (MB)

In the lead-up to the lib­er­a­tion of enslaved peo­ple under the Thirteenth Amendment, abo­li­tion­ists argued about the fate of slaves once they were freed. One group argued for col­o­niza­tion, either by return­ing the for­mer­ly enslaved peo­ple to Africa or cre­at­ing their own home­land. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln rec­og­nized the ex-slave coun­tries of Haiti and Liberia, hop­ing to open up chan­nels for col­o­niza­tion, with Congress allo­cat­ing $600,000 to help. While the col­o­niza­tion plan did not pan out, the coun­try set forth on a path of legal­ly man­dat­ed seg­re­ga­tion. The first steps toward offi­cial seg­re­ga­tion came in the form of “Black Codes.” These were laws passed through­out the South start­ing around 1865 that dic­tat­ed most aspects of Black peo­ples’ lives, includ­ing work­ing and liv­ing. The codes also ensured Black people’s avail­abil­i­ty for cheap labor after they abol­ished slavery.

Segregation soon became an offi­cial pol­i­cy enforced by a series of Southern laws. Through so-called Jim Crow laws (named after a deroga­to­ry term for Blacks), leg­is­la­tors seg­re­gat­ed every­thing from schools to res­i­den­tial areas to pub­lic parks to the­aters to pools to ceme­ter­ies, asy­lums, jails, and res­i­den­tial homes. There were sep­a­rate wait­ing rooms for whites and Black peo­ple in pro­fes­sion­al offices, and, in 1915, Oklahoma became the first state even to seg­re­gate pub­lic phone booths.
Colleges were seg­re­gat­ed, and sep­a­rate Black insti­tu­tions like Howard University in Washington, D.C. and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee were cre­at­ed to com­pen­sate. Virginia’s Hampton Institute was estab­lished in 1869 as a school for Black youth, but with white instruc­tors teach­ing skills to rel­e­gate Black peo­ple in ser­vice posi­tions to whites.

The Supreme Court and Segregation

In 1875 the out­go­ing Republican-con­trolled House and Senate passed a civ­il rights bill out­law­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion in schools, church­es, and pub­lic trans­porta­tion. But the bill was bare­ly enforced and was over­turned by the Supreme Court in 1883.
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that seg­re­ga­tion was con­sti­tu­tion­al. The rul­ing estab­lished the idea of “sep­a­rate but equal.” The case involved a mixed-race man who was forced to sit in the Black-des­ig­nat­ed train car under Louisiana’s Separate Car Act.

Black Codes

Black codes were restric­tive laws designed to lim­it the free­dom of African Americans and ensure their avail­abil­i­ty as a cheap labor force after slav­ery was abol­ished dur­ing the Civil War. Though the Union vic­to­ry had giv­en some 4 mil­lion enslaved peo­ple their free­dom, the ques­tion of freed blacks’ sta­tus in the post­war South was still very much unre­solved. Under black codes, many states required Black peo­ple to sign year­ly labor con­tracts; if they refused, they risked being arrest­ed, fined, and forced into unpaid labor. Outrage over black codes helped under­mine sup­port for President Andrew Johnson and the Republican Party.
When slav­ery end­ed in the United States, free­dom still elud­ed African Americans who con­tend­ed with the repres­sive set of laws known as the black codes. Widely enact­ed through­out the South fol­low­ing the Civil War—a peri­od called Reconstruction—these laws both lim­it­ed the rights of Black peo­ple and exploit­ed them as a labor source.
In fact, life after bondage didn’t dif­fer much from life dur­ing bondage for the African Americans sub­ject­ed to the black codes. This was by design, as slav­ery had been a mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar enter­prise, and the for­mer Confederate states sought a way to con­tin­ue this sys­tem of subjugation.

“They may have lost the war, but they’re not going to lose pow­er civi­cal­ly and social­ly,” says M. Keith Claybrook Jr., an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Long Beach. “So, the black codes were an attempt to restrict and lim­it freedom.”
Losing the Civil War meant the South had lit­tle choice but to rec­og­nize the Reconstruction-era poli­cies that abol­ished slav­ery. By using the law to deny African Americans the oppor­tu­ni­ties and priv­i­leges that white peo­ple enjoyed, the one-time Confederacy could keep these new­ly lib­er­at­ed Americans in vir­tu­al bondage. White planters in these states denied Black peo­ple the chance to rent or buy land and paid them a pit­tance. The 1865 rat­i­fi­ca­tion of the 13^th Amendmentpro­hib­it­ed slav­ery and servi­tude in all cir­cum­stances “except as a pun­ish­ment for crime.” This loop­hole result­ed in Southern states pass­ing the black codes to crim­i­nal­ize activ­i­ties that would make it easy to imprison African Americans and effec­tive­ly force them into servi­tude once more

First enact­ed in 1865 in South Carolina and Mississippi, the black codes var­ied slight­ly from place to place but were gen­er­al­ly very sim­i­lar. They pro­hib­it­ed “loi­ter­ing, vagrancy,” Claybrook says. “The idea was that if you’re going to be free, you should be work­ing. If you had three or four Black peo­ple stand­ing around talk­ing, they were actu­al­ly vagrant and could be con­vict­ed of a crime and sent to jail.” In addi­tion to crim­i­nal­iz­ing job­less­ness for African Americans, the codes required Black peo­ple to sign annu­al labor con­tracts that ensured they received the low­est pay pos­si­ble for their work. The codes con­tained anti-entice­ment mea­sures to pre­vent prospec­tive employ­ers from pay­ing Black work­ers high­er wages than their cur­rent employ­ers paid them. Failing to sign a labor con­tract could result in the offend­er being arrest­ed, sen­tenced to unpaid labor, or fined. Fees were the eas­i­est way to rein­sti­tute servi­tude, as African Americans earned so lit­tle that pay­ing a steep fine was out of the ques­tion for most of them. Failure to pay fines allowed the state to order them to work off their bal­ances, a debt peon­age sys­tem. Typically this work was agri­cul­tur­al in nature, just as Black Americans had per­formed while enslaved.

Black chil­dren were not spared from forced labor. If their “par­ents were seen to be unfit or weren’t around, the state received these chil­dren as orphans, and they would be put into appren­tice­ships,” Claybrook says. “Again, they are doing work with­out compensation.”
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