"What replaced the Black Codes, Leon F. Litwack wrote, was not racial integration but an informal code of exclusion and discrimination. The laws that came to be known collectively as the Black Codes ended officially in 2000."
Black Codes
Excerpt from Beads on a String
The Black Codes were laws passed on
the state and local level in the United States to restrict the civil rights and
civil liberties of Black People, particularly former slaves in former
Confederate states. The Black Codes granted African Americans certain rights, such as
legalized marriage, ownership of property, and limited access to the
courts. But the Black Codes denied them the rights to testify against
whites, to serve on juries or in state militias, or to vote, and express
legal concern publicly. And, in response to planters’ demands that the
freed people be required to work on the plantations, the Black Codes
declared that those who failed to sign yearly labor contracts could be
arrested and hired out to white landowners. Some states limited the
occupations open to African Americans and barred them from acquiring
land, and others provided that judges could assign African American
children to work for their former owners without the consent of their
parent
Segregation
As one historian has noted, racial
segregation was hardly a new phenomenon. Before the Civil War, when slavery had
fixed the status of most blacks, no need was felt for statutory measures
segregating the races.
The
restrictive Black Codes, along with the few segregation laws passed by the
first postwar governments, did not survive Reconstruction, Litwack wrote[p.
229] in Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, the sequel
to his Pulitzer Prize-winning history ‘Been in the Storm So Long’ The Aftermath
of Slavery. What replaced the Black Codes, Leon F. Litwack wrote, was not
racial integration but an informal code of exclusion and discrimination. The
laws that came to be known collectively as the Black Codes ended officially in
2000.History
Although the Black Codes are most
commonly associated with the Southern states after the American Civil War until
the beginning of Reconstruction, where they were used to regulate the freedoms
of former slaves, Black Codes developed over the span of half a century or more
and some laws date to the early 19th century in Northern states.
Expansion: 1830-1860
As the abolitionist movement gained
steam and escape programs for slaves such as the Underground Railroad expanded,
so did the backlash of negrophobia among whites in the North. Indiana passed an
anti-miscegenation statute in 1845. In several states the Black Codes were
either incorporated into or required by their state constitutions, many of
which were rewritten in the 1840s. Article 13 of Indiana's 1851 Constitution
stated No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State, after the
adoption of this Constitution. The 1848 Constitution of Illinois led to one of
the harshest Black Code systems in the nation until the Civil War. The Illinois
Black Code of 1853 extended a complete prohibition against black immigration
into the state.
Post-Civil War
After the abolition of slavery by
the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, all former slave
states adopted new Black Codes. During 1865, the first year of Reconstruction,
every southern state passed new Black Codes that restricted the Freedmen, who
were free but not yet citizens. They gave freedmen only a limited set of
second-class civil rights and no voting rights, while pursuing a goal of
re-admission to the Union. Southern plantation owners feared that they would
lose their land or, if not, that blacks would not do their field work; many
Southern whites feared that blacks would consider themselves their equals.
Mississippi and South Carolina black codes have been described thus:
Negroes must make annual contracts
for their labor in writing; if they should run away from their tasks, they
forfeited their wages for the year. Whenever it was required of them they must
present licenses (in a town from the mayor; elsewhere from a member of the
board of police of the beat) citing their places of residence and authorizing
them to work. Fugitives from labor were to be arrested and carried back to
their employers. Five dollars a head and mileage would be allowed such Negro
catchers. It was made a misdemeanor, punishable with fine or imprisonment, to
persuade a freedman to leave his employer, or to feed the runaway. Minors were
to be apprenticed, if males until they were twenty-one, if females until
eighteen years of age. Such corporal punishment as a father would administer to
a child might be inflicted upon apprentices by their masters. Vagrants were to
be fined heavily, and if they could not pay the sum, they were to be hired out
to service until the claim was satisfied. Negroes might not carry knives or
firearms unless they were licensed so to do. It was an offence, to be punished
by a fine of $50 and imprisonment for thirty days, to give or sell intoxicating
liquors to a Negro. When Negroes could not pay the fines and costs after legal
proceedings, they were to be hired at public outcry by the sheriff to the
lowest bidder.
In South Carolina persons of color
contracting for service were to be known as servants, and those with whom they
contracted, as masters. On farms the hours of labor would be from sunrise to
sunset daily, except on Sunday. The Negroes were to get out of bed at dawn.
Time lost would be deducted from their wages, as would be the cost of food,
nursing, etc., during absence from sickness. Absentees on Sunday must return to
the plantation by sunset. House servants were to be at call at all hours of the
day and night on all days of the week. They must be especially civil and polite
to their masters, their masters' families and guests, and they in return would
receive gentle and kind treatment. Corporal and other punishment was to be
administered only upon order of the district judge or other civil magistrate. A
vagrant law of some severity was enacted to keep the Negroes from roaming the
roads and living the lives of beggars and thieves.
The Black Codes outraged public
opinion in the North because it seemed the South was creating a form of
quasi-slavery to evade the results of the war. Congress also passed the
Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, but Johnson blocked it.
After winning large majorities in the 1866 elections, the Republicans put the
South under military rule and held new elections in which the Freedmen could
vote. The new governments repealed all the Black Codes, and they were never
reenacted. The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified and went into effect.
Distinction from Jim Crow laws
The Black Codes of the 1860s are
not the same as the Jim Crow laws. The Black Codes were resultant of the
abolition of slavery and the South's defeat in the Civil War. They were enacted
in the 1860s, whereas the Jim Crow era began later, nearer to the end of the
19th century.
BLACK CODES of TEXAS
CHAPTER LIX.
An Act to amend an Act entitled an Act to establish a Code of Criminal
Procedure for the State of Texas, approved August 26th, 1866, and to repeal
certain portions thereof.
SECTION
1. Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Texas; That Article 143 of the above named
Code; be so amended as to hereafter read as follows:
. . . 3rd. Persons of color shall not testify,
except where the prosecution is against a person who is a person of color; or
where the offence is charged to have been committed against the person or property
of a person of color.
SEC. 3. That this Act takes effect and be in
force fro and after its passage; Approved October 26th, 1866.
CHAPTER LXXX.
An Act regulating Contracts
for Labor
SECTION
1. Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Texas, That all persons desirous of
engaging as laborers for a period of one year or less, may do so under the
following regulations: All contracts for labor for a longer period than one
month shall be made in writing, and in the presence of a Justice of the peace,
County Judge, County Clerk, Notary Public, or two disinterested witnesses, in
whose presence the contract shall be read to the laborers, and, when assented
to, shall be signed in triplicate b both parties, and shall then be considered
binding, for the time therein prescribed.
SEC. 2. Every laborer shall have full and
perfect liberty to choose his or her employer, but when once chosen, they shall
be allowed to leave their place of employment, until the fulfillment of their
contract, unless by consent of their employer, or on account of harsh treatment
or breach of contract on the part of the employer, and if they do so leave
without cause or permission, they shall forfeit all wages earned to the time of
abandonment.
SEC. 3. One copy of the contracts, above
provided for, shall be deposited with the Clerk of the County Court of the
county in which the employer resides; and the Clerk shall endorse thereon,
filed, giving the date, and signing his name officially ; the contract then
shall have the force and effect of an authentic act, and be conclusive evidence
of the intent of the parties thereto : but all disputes arising between the
parties shall be decided before a court of competent jurisdiction, and said
court shall have power to enforce the same.
SEC. 4. The Clerk of the County Court shall
enter, in a well bond book kept for that purpose, a regular and alphabetical
index to the contracts filed, showing the name of the employer, and the
employed, the date of filing, and the duration of the contract, which book,
together with the contracts filed, shall, at all times, be subject to the
examination of every person interested, without fee. The Clerk shall be
entitled to demand from the party filing such contract, a fee of twenty-five
cents, which shall be full compensation of all services required under this
Act.
SEC. 5. All labor contracts shall be made with
the heads of families; they shall embrace the labor of all the members of the
family named therein, able to work, and shall be binding on all.
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