Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. On April ninth, eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, the long and bloody American Civil War finally
Speaker 1: came to an end. It had already been two years
Speaker 1: since President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, but after
Speaker 1: the Confederacy's surrender, words spread, if slowly, to the more
Speaker 1: than four million formerly enslaved black men, women, and children
Speaker 1: that they were truly and officially free. White plantation owners, however,
Speaker 1: in league with Southern lawmakers and northern corporations, had other ideas.
Speaker 1: Starting with Mississippi and South Carolina, all white state legislatures
Speaker 1: passed a series of laws called the Black Codes, intent
Speaker 1: on re enslaving people by essentially criminalizing being black. For
Speaker 1: the article this episode is based on how Stuff Work,
Speaker 1: spoke with T. Dion Bailey, a history professor at Colgate
Speaker 1: University who specializes in African American women's history and mass incarceration.
Speaker 1: She explained, White Southerners have a clear sense of how
Speaker 1: they want to restructure their society after the Civil War,
Speaker 1: and they're going to make sure that they do that
Speaker 1: through these legal and extra legal means. The Black Codes,
Speaker 1: enacted in late eighteen sixty five and early eighteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: were devised to keep freed people in the South legally
Speaker 1: bound to plantations. With real emancipation, newly freed black people
Speaker 1: could strike out on their own, farming their own land
Speaker 1: or applying a trade as a skilled artisan. The greatest
Speaker 1: fear of Southern cotton growers and their northern manufacturing partners
Speaker 1: was that with the end of slavery, they would lose
Speaker 1: access to the cheap or free and plentiful labor that
Speaker 1: had made cotton a cash crop. The result was what
Speaker 1: journalist Douglas Blackman called slavery by another name, which is
Speaker 1: the title of his two thousand eight book, namely, the
Speaker 1: widespread practice of free black men and women unjustly imprisoned
Speaker 1: and then auctioned off to plantations and corporations to work
Speaker 1: off their fines. Vagrancy laws were common in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: giving local sheriffs the authority to arrest vagrants who were unemployed,
Speaker 1: hanging out on the street and potentially looking for trouble.
Speaker 1: But the Black Codes in states like Mississippi and South
Speaker 1: Carolina created a whole new category of vagrancy that only
Speaker 1: applied to black people. Bailey said, after the Civil War,
Speaker 1: the South was destroyed, there was no infrastructure left. You
Speaker 1: have poor whites and newly freed blacks, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people didn't have jobs. But these vagrancy laws specifically
Speaker 1: attacked African Americans. According to these codes, any black person
Speaker 1: who didn't have a work contract as a servant for
Speaker 1: a white master could be arrested for vagrancy. That meant
Speaker 1: that no black person could farm for themselves or work
Speaker 1: independently as a blacksmith or carpenter. They had to work
Speaker 1: for a white person, often the very same person who
Speaker 1: formerly enslaved them, or go to jail. Poor white people,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, might be charged with the vagrancy,
Speaker 1: but the court's customarily waived any fines, hard labor, or
Speaker 1: other punishments. But a black person arrested for vagrancy under
Speaker 1: the Black Codes would enter a cycle of forced labor
Speaker 1: from which there was little hope of escape. At first,
Speaker 1: they would be hit with a fine so exorbitant that
Speaker 1: they'd never be able to pay it. Then they'd be
Speaker 1: hired out to a planter who would pay the vagrants
Speaker 1: wages directly to the state. Once a black person was
Speaker 1: convicted of vagrancy, there was no incentive for former slave
Speaker 1: masters to ever set them free. Bailey said, your labor
Speaker 1: is costing almost nothing. They don't have to clothe you.
Speaker 1: They only have to feed you enough to keep you alive.
Speaker 1: And there's a sense that even if one vagrant dies,
Speaker 1: you could get another under this guise of vagrancy. They
Speaker 1: knew it was an unlimited source of black bodies. The U. S.
Speaker 1: Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, formally abolishing slavery in January
Speaker 1: of eighteen sixty five, before the end of the Civil War,
Speaker 1: but the amendment contains a gaping loophole that the Black
Speaker 1: Codes were quick to exploit. The Thirteenth Amendment states, neither
Speaker 1: slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime,
Speaker 1: whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist
Speaker 1: within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Speaker 1: So slavery was abolished except when it was a punishment
Speaker 1: for a crime, which is why the Black Codes made
Speaker 1: black vagrancy a crime, and why young black children would
Speaker 1: be forcibly removed from their parents under the guise of
Speaker 1: negligence and then apprenticed to a white planter for no pay.
Speaker 1: Bailey said this was a legal system set up to
Speaker 1: not only mimic slavery, but to re enslave all these
Speaker 1: newly freed men, women and children, and it effectively did.
Speaker 1: Tens of thousands of black people were leased by the
Speaker 1: state to planters, miners, corporations, and others to pay off
Speaker 1: these debts. Formerly enslaved people were afforded some new rights
Speaker 1: under the Black Codes too. They could own land and property,
Speaker 1: They could legally marry the only other black people, and
Speaker 1: they could sue, be sued, and testify in court, though
Speaker 1: not against white people. But those few rights primarily served
Speaker 1: to give freed people the legal standing to get in trouble.
Speaker 1: Bailey said, Southern lawmakers try to hide this under the
Speaker 1: guise of well, you do have some rights. You can marry,
Speaker 1: you can testify in court, but only if it was
Speaker 1: a person of their race. A black person could never
Speaker 1: take recourse against a person they worked for who was
Speaker 1: taking advantage of them or who didn't pay them. The
Speaker 1: Black Codes were short lived. The US Congress, frustrated with
Speaker 1: attempts by Southern lawmakers to sidestep Reconstruction passed the Civil
Speaker 1: Rights Act of eighteen sixty six, which affirmed that black
Speaker 1: Americans must be afforded the same civil rights as white Americans.
Speaker 1: In the wake of this act, the federal government imposed
Speaker 1: what's known as radical reconstruction on the former Confederate States.
Speaker 1: During this time, black men were given the right to
Speaker 1: vote and run for political office, and thousands of public
Speaker 1: schools opened across the South to serve black children. The
Speaker 1: Black Codes were nullified, but their legacy would echo down.
Speaker 1: Bailey said, the Black Codes laid the framework for how
Speaker 1: this whole system is going to work for the next
Speaker 1: a hundred years. Jim Crow laws, enacted in the South
Speaker 1: in the eighteen nineties and lasting all the way to
Speaker 1: the civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and sixties,
Speaker 1: made it illegal for black and white people to share
Speaker 1: any public facilities, meaning that both groups had separate schools, libraries, hospitals, restaurants,
Speaker 1: et cetera, with black people received inferior facilities. Other laws
Speaker 1: required literacy tests and or poll taxes to be paid
Speaker 1: before voting, all designed to disenfranchise poor African Americans. In
Speaker 1: that book Slavery by Another Name, journalist Blackman wrote about
Speaker 1: a black man named Green Cottonham who was arrested in
Speaker 1: night in Alabama for vagrancy, the same trumped up charge
Speaker 1: invented forty years earlier by the Black Codes. Cuttenham was
Speaker 1: auctioned off to the Northern Corporation U. S. Steele, who
Speaker 1: chained him in a Birmingham, Alabama coal mine and tasked
Speaker 1: him with mining eight tons of coal a day until
Speaker 1: his fine was repaid. If he collapsed from malnourishment or fatigue,
Speaker 1: he'd be whipped, and if he died, he'd be buried
Speaker 1: in a shallow, unmarked grave with the rest. More than
Speaker 1: the thousand black men were toiling for U. S. Steel
Speaker 1: along with Cottenham in the same mine. In less than
Speaker 1: one year, sixty were dead from disease, accidents or homicide.
Speaker 1: Even today, over a hundred years later, thousands of prisoners
Speaker 1: in the US, mostly Black and Latino, perform work for
Speaker 1: some very large corporations and are paid less than a
Speaker 1: dollar an hour. And it was all set in motion
Speaker 1: by the Black Codes. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article Slavery under another name, What Were the Black Codes?
Speaker 1: On how Stuff Works dot Com, written by Dave Rouse
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff's production of I heart Radio in partnership with
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Clang.
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