WEBVTT - How Did the Black Codes Work? 0:00:01.920 --> 0:00:04.320 Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio, 0:00:06.600 --> 0:00:11.240 Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. On April ninth, eighteen 0:00:11.320 --> 0:00:15.280 sixty five, the long and bloody American Civil War finally 0:00:15.440 --> 0:00:18.759 came to an end. It had already been two years 0:00:18.880 --> 0:00:23.800 since President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, but after 0:00:23.840 --> 0:00:27.920 the Confederacy's surrender, words spread, if slowly, to the more 0:00:27.960 --> 0:00:32.000 than four million formerly enslaved black men, women, and children 0:00:32.200 --> 0:00:37.760 that they were truly and officially free. White plantation owners, however, 0:00:38.000 --> 0:00:42.720 in league with Southern lawmakers and northern corporations, had other ideas. 0:00:43.159 --> 0:00:47.320 Starting with Mississippi and South Carolina, all white state legislatures 0:00:47.400 --> 0:00:50.920 passed a series of laws called the Black Codes, intent 0:00:51.080 --> 0:00:56.160 on re enslaving people by essentially criminalizing being black. For 0:00:56.320 --> 0:00:58.680 the article this episode is based on how Stuff Work, 0:00:58.760 --> 0:01:02.040 spoke with T. Dion Bailey, a history professor at Colgate 0:01:02.120 --> 0:01:06.680 University who specializes in African American women's history and mass incarceration. 0:01:07.640 --> 0:01:11.000 She explained, White Southerners have a clear sense of how 0:01:11.000 --> 0:01:13.479 they want to restructure their society after the Civil War, 0:01:13.920 --> 0:01:15.800 and they're going to make sure that they do that 0:01:15.920 --> 0:01:20.360 through these legal and extra legal means. The Black Codes, 0:01:20.480 --> 0:01:24.080 enacted in late eighteen sixty five and early eighteen sixty six, 0:01:24.240 --> 0:01:27.720 were devised to keep freed people in the South legally 0:01:27.760 --> 0:01:33.280 bound to plantations. With real emancipation, newly freed black people 0:01:33.319 --> 0:01:36.040 could strike out on their own, farming their own land 0:01:36.160 --> 0:01:39.720 or applying a trade as a skilled artisan. The greatest 0:01:39.800 --> 0:01:43.480 fear of Southern cotton growers and their northern manufacturing partners 0:01:43.880 --> 0:01:46.360 was that with the end of slavery, they would lose 0:01:46.400 --> 0:01:49.720 access to the cheap or free and plentiful labor that 0:01:49.800 --> 0:01:53.960 had made cotton a cash crop. The result was what 0:01:54.080 --> 0:01:58.200 journalist Douglas Blackman called slavery by another name, which is 0:01:58.240 --> 0:02:01.200 the title of his two thousand eight book, namely, the 0:02:01.240 --> 0:02:05.320 widespread practice of free black men and women unjustly imprisoned 0:02:05.560 --> 0:02:09.000 and then auctioned off to plantations and corporations to work 0:02:09.040 --> 0:02:14.800 off their fines. Vagrancy laws were common in the nineteenth century, 0:02:15.160 --> 0:02:19.079 giving local sheriffs the authority to arrest vagrants who were unemployed, 0:02:19.200 --> 0:02:21.720 hanging out on the street and potentially looking for trouble. 0:02:22.680 --> 0:02:25.440 But the Black Codes in states like Mississippi and South 0:02:25.440 --> 0:02:29.239 Carolina created a whole new category of vagrancy that only 0:02:29.280 --> 0:02:34.080 applied to black people. Bailey said, after the Civil War, 0:02:34.280 --> 0:02:37.760 the South was destroyed, there was no infrastructure left. You 0:02:37.919 --> 0:02:40.760 have poor whites and newly freed blacks, and a lot 0:02:40.800 --> 0:02:44.480 of people didn't have jobs. But these vagrancy laws specifically 0:02:44.520 --> 0:02:50.239 attacked African Americans. According to these codes, any black person 0:02:50.280 --> 0:02:53.040 who didn't have a work contract as a servant for 0:02:53.120 --> 0:02:57.400 a white master could be arrested for vagrancy. That meant 0:02:57.480 --> 0:03:00.639 that no black person could farm for themselves or work 0:03:00.680 --> 0:03:04.760 independently as a blacksmith or carpenter. They had to work 0:03:04.840 --> 0:03:07.639 for a white person, often the very same person who 0:03:07.680 --> 0:03:12.840 formerly enslaved them, or go to jail. Poor white people, 0:03:12.919 --> 0:03:15.280 on the other hand, might be charged with the vagrancy, 0:03:15.520 --> 0:03:19.360 but the court's customarily waived any fines, hard labor, or 0:03:19.400 --> 0:03:23.839 other punishments. But a black person arrested for vagrancy under 0:03:23.880 --> 0:03:26.760 the Black Codes would enter a cycle of forced labor 0:03:26.919 --> 0:03:30.000 from which there was little hope of escape. At first, 0:03:30.040 --> 0:03:32.240 they would be hit with a fine so exorbitant that 0:03:32.280 --> 0:03:34.920 they'd never be able to pay it. Then they'd be 0:03:35.000 --> 0:03:38.120 hired out to a planter who would pay the vagrants 0:03:38.120 --> 0:03:41.960 wages directly to the state. Once a black person was 0:03:42.000 --> 0:03:45.400 convicted of vagrancy, there was no incentive for former slave 0:03:45.440 --> 0:03:49.760 masters to ever set them free. Bailey said, your labor 0:03:49.920 --> 0:03:52.440 is costing almost nothing. They don't have to clothe you. 0:03:52.640 --> 0:03:54.680 They only have to feed you enough to keep you alive. 0:03:55.760 --> 0:03:58.280 And there's a sense that even if one vagrant dies, 0:03:58.440 --> 0:04:02.440 you could get another under this guise of vagrancy. They 0:04:02.640 --> 0:04:06.840 knew it was an unlimited source of black bodies. The U. S. 0:04:06.880 --> 0:04:11.880 Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, formally abolishing slavery in January 0:04:11.960 --> 0:04:14.800 of eighteen sixty five, before the end of the Civil War, 0:04:15.720 --> 0:04:19.040 but the amendment contains a gaping loophole that the Black 0:04:19.080 --> 0:04:23.120 Codes were quick to exploit. The Thirteenth Amendment states, neither 0:04:23.200 --> 0:04:27.480 slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, 0:04:27.600 --> 0:04:30.919 whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist 0:04:30.960 --> 0:04:34.720 within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. 0:04:36.360 --> 0:04:39.799 So slavery was abolished except when it was a punishment 0:04:39.839 --> 0:04:43.080 for a crime, which is why the Black Codes made 0:04:43.200 --> 0:04:47.240 black vagrancy a crime, and why young black children would 0:04:47.240 --> 0:04:49.560 be forcibly removed from their parents under the guise of 0:04:49.680 --> 0:04:54.480 negligence and then apprenticed to a white planter for no pay. 0:04:55.320 --> 0:04:58.479 Bailey said this was a legal system set up to 0:04:58.720 --> 0:05:02.040 not only mimic slavery, but to re enslave all these 0:05:02.160 --> 0:05:05.880 newly freed men, women and children, and it effectively did. 0:05:07.160 --> 0:05:10.039 Tens of thousands of black people were leased by the 0:05:10.080 --> 0:05:14.000 state to planters, miners, corporations, and others to pay off 0:05:14.120 --> 0:05:19.360 these debts. Formerly enslaved people were afforded some new rights 0:05:19.440 --> 0:05:23.120 under the Black Codes too. They could own land and property, 0:05:23.440 --> 0:05:26.480 They could legally marry the only other black people, and 0:05:26.680 --> 0:05:30.200 they could sue, be sued, and testify in court, though 0:05:30.320 --> 0:05:34.880 not against white people. But those few rights primarily served 0:05:34.960 --> 0:05:38.200 to give freed people the legal standing to get in trouble. 0:05:39.480 --> 0:05:42.960 Bailey said, Southern lawmakers try to hide this under the 0:05:43.000 --> 0:05:45.520 guise of well, you do have some rights. You can marry, 0:05:45.560 --> 0:05:47.880 you can testify in court, but only if it was 0:05:47.920 --> 0:05:50.719 a person of their race. A black person could never 0:05:50.760 --> 0:05:53.279 take recourse against a person they worked for who was 0:05:53.320 --> 0:05:56.760 taking advantage of them or who didn't pay them. The 0:05:56.800 --> 0:06:00.599 Black Codes were short lived. The US Congress, frustrated with 0:06:00.600 --> 0:06:04.760 attempts by Southern lawmakers to sidestep Reconstruction passed the Civil 0:06:04.800 --> 0:06:07.719 Rights Act of eighteen sixty six, which affirmed that black 0:06:07.760 --> 0:06:11.200 Americans must be afforded the same civil rights as white Americans. 0:06:12.000 --> 0:06:14.760 In the wake of this act, the federal government imposed 0:06:14.760 --> 0:06:18.799 what's known as radical reconstruction on the former Confederate States. 0:06:19.520 --> 0:06:21.920 During this time, black men were given the right to 0:06:22.000 --> 0:06:25.000 vote and run for political office, and thousands of public 0:06:25.040 --> 0:06:29.640 schools opened across the South to serve black children. The 0:06:29.680 --> 0:06:33.520 Black Codes were nullified, but their legacy would echo down. 0:06:34.320 --> 0:06:37.640 Bailey said, the Black Codes laid the framework for how 0:06:37.680 --> 0:06:39.719 this whole system is going to work for the next 0:06:39.720 --> 0:06:43.600 a hundred years. Jim Crow laws, enacted in the South 0:06:43.600 --> 0:06:45.960 in the eighteen nineties and lasting all the way to 0:06:46.000 --> 0:06:48.880 the civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and sixties, 0:06:49.200 --> 0:06:51.679 made it illegal for black and white people to share 0:06:51.720 --> 0:06:57.919 any public facilities, meaning that both groups had separate schools, libraries, hospitals, restaurants, 0:06:57.920 --> 0:07:03.119 et cetera, with black people received inferior facilities. Other laws 0:07:03.160 --> 0:07:06.679 required literacy tests and or poll taxes to be paid 0:07:06.720 --> 0:07:12.920 before voting, all designed to disenfranchise poor African Americans. In 0:07:13.160 --> 0:07:16.800 that book Slavery by Another Name, journalist Blackman wrote about 0:07:16.840 --> 0:07:20.200 a black man named Green Cottonham who was arrested in 0:07:20.280 --> 0:07:24.440 night in Alabama for vagrancy, the same trumped up charge 0:07:24.520 --> 0:07:28.400 invented forty years earlier by the Black Codes. Cuttenham was 0:07:28.440 --> 0:07:31.920 auctioned off to the Northern Corporation U. S. Steele, who 0:07:32.000 --> 0:07:35.280 chained him in a Birmingham, Alabama coal mine and tasked 0:07:35.360 --> 0:07:38.160 him with mining eight tons of coal a day until 0:07:38.280 --> 0:07:42.760 his fine was repaid. If he collapsed from malnourishment or fatigue, 0:07:42.960 --> 0:07:46.320 he'd be whipped, and if he died, he'd be buried 0:07:46.360 --> 0:07:49.800 in a shallow, unmarked grave with the rest. More than 0:07:49.800 --> 0:07:52.559 the thousand black men were toiling for U. S. Steel 0:07:52.600 --> 0:07:55.720 along with Cottenham in the same mine. In less than 0:07:55.800 --> 0:08:00.160 one year, sixty were dead from disease, accidents or homicide. 0:08:01.640 --> 0:08:05.320 Even today, over a hundred years later, thousands of prisoners 0:08:05.360 --> 0:08:08.880 in the US, mostly Black and Latino, perform work for 0:08:09.000 --> 0:08:12.040 some very large corporations and are paid less than a 0:08:12.080 --> 0:08:14.680 dollar an hour. And it was all set in motion 0:08:14.880 --> 0:08:25.320 by the Black Codes. Today's episode is based on the 0:08:25.400 --> 0:08:28.640 article Slavery under another name, What Were the Black Codes? 0:08:28.720 --> 0:08:31.000 On how Stuff Works dot Com, written by Dave Rouse 0:08:31.520 --> 0:08:33.880 Brain Stuff's production of I heart Radio in partnership with 0:08:33.920 --> 0:08:36.280 how stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Clang. 0:08:36.840 --> 0:08:39.439 Four more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeart 0:08:39.520 --> 0:08:42.200 Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your 0:08:42.200 --> 0:08:42.920 favorite shows.