When slavery ended in the United States, freedom still eluded African Americans who struggled with the repressive body of laws known as the Black Codes. Widely adopted across the South after the Civil War – a period known as Reconstruction – these laws limited black rights and exploited them as a source of work.
In fact, life after bondage was not much different from life while bondage for African Americans under black codes. This was on purpose, for slavery had been a multibillion dollar enterprise, and the former Confederate States were looking for a way to continue this system of subjugation.
“They may have lost the war, but they will not lose power civically and socially,” says Keith Claybrook Jr., assistant professor in the Department of African Studies at California State University in Long Beach. “So the black codes were an attempt to restrict and limit freedom.”
The loss of the Civil War meant the South had little choice but to recognize the policies of the Reconstruction Age that abolished slavery. However, by using the law to deny African Americans the opportunities and privileges enjoyed by whites, the old Confederation could keep these newly freed Americans in virtual slavery.
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A loophole in the 13th Amendment
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White planters in these states denied black people the opportunity to lease or buy land and paid them a pittance. The ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865 banned slavery and servitude under all circumstances “except as a punishment for crime”. This loophole led southern states to adopt black codes to criminalize activities that would facilitate the imprisonment of African Americans and force them once again into bondage.
First adopted in 1865 in states like South Carolina and Mississippi, black codes varied slightly from place to place, but were generally very similar. They have banned “loitering, vagrancy,” Claybrook says. “The idea was that if you want to be free you should work. If you had three or four black people talking, they were actually vagrants and could be convicted of a crime and sent to jail.
In addition to criminalizing the unemployment of African Americans, the codes required them to sign annual employment contracts guaranteeing that they received the lowest possible pay for their work. The codes contained anti-incentive measures to prevent potential employers from paying black workers higher wages than their current employers. Failure to sign an employment contract could result in the offender being arrested, sentenced to unpaid work or fined.
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Debt bondage
A free black man sold to pay his fine, in Monticello, Florida, 1867.
Provisional Archives / Getty Images
Fees were the easiest way to restore bondage, as African Americans earned so little that most of them were out of the question of paying a hefty fine. Failure to pay the fines allowed the state to order them to set off their balances, a system called debt peonage. Typically, this work was agricultural in nature, just as black Americans had done in slavery.
Black children have not been spared from forced labor. If their “parents were found to be unfit or absent, the state would receive these children as orphans, and they would be apprenticed,” Claybrook says. “Again, they are working without pay.”
Black codes not only forced African Americans to work for free, but essentially put them under surveillance. Their whereabouts, meetings and religious services were all monitored by local authorities and officials. Black people needed white passes and sponsors to move from place to place or to leave town. Collectively, these regulations codified a permanent subclass status for African Americans.
After black codes swept the south in 1865, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to give African Americans more rights – to some extent. This legislation allowed blacks to rent or own property, enter into contracts, and take cases to court (against other African Americans). In addition, it allowed individuals who violated their rights to be prosecuted.
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Progress with the 14th and 15th amendments
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Passing the 14th and 15th Amendments gave African Americans some hope for the future. Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment granted citizenship and “equal protection of the laws” to blacks, while the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, gave black men the right to vote in 1870. Ultimately, the South did repealed the black codes, but the repeal of those restrictions did not significantly improve the lives of African Americans.
“With the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments, there was a shift towards the Jim Crow laws, which were sort of a perpetuation of black codes,” says Connie Hassett-Walker, assistant professor of justice studies and sociology at the University of Norwich. in Vermont. “You’re not just flipping the switch and all that structural discrimination and hatred is going off. It continued.
And black Americans were not “separate but equal,” as the Jim Crow states claimed. Instead, their communities had fewer resources than white communities, and white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized them.
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“You are starting to see the rise in the lynching, and the lynchings were really about the message sent to living people,” Hassett-Walker says. “Maybe it was about punishing that person, but it was done to keep other people in line, to say, ‘See, this could happen to you.'”
The mere exercise of his right to vote could lead to a visit from the Klan, and employment opportunities for black Americans remained limited. They worked largely as sharecroppers, which involved working the land of other people (usually whites) for a fraction of the value of any crops grown.
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To say that badly paid sharecropping would be an understatement, and impoverished African Americans racked up debt in stores that charged them high interest rates on supplies they needed as farmers.
Those who could not pay their debts risked incarceration or forced labor, just as they did during the Black Codes. The debt peonage system deprived them of income and again locked them into bondage. In addition, the police jailed them for minor offenses for which whites were not jailed in equal numbers, if at all. In prison, black Americans – men, women and children – provided free labor.
Black codes may have been repealed, but African Americans continued to face a series of regulations that reduced them to second-class citizens well into the twentieth century. It would take the activism of civil rights leaders and the 1964 Civil Rights Act to see this legislation overturned.
