EOTO #2: The Black Codes

    Following their defeat in the Civil War, the Southern Confederacy begrudgingly gave the newly Free African American population their freedom, but in their racial pridefulness and megalomania they passed the Black Codes; a set of restrictive laws meant to make the vast difference between slavery and freedom as minute as possible. The Southern elite couldn't stomach the idea that the Black population was approaching economic independence and they enacted many laws to try and maintain Black people as a cheap labor force through a system scarily similar to slavery.

    In late 1865, Mississippi and South Carolina instituted the first of the Black Codes. The Mississippi law required Black people to have written evidence of employment from a White man by the second week of January and if not, they were to be labeled as vagrants and subject to arrest or fines. Not only were they subject to arrest, but they had to forfeit earlier wages. These vagrancy laws led to a morally reprehensible system of prison labor that exploited the wording of the 13th Amendment, specifically the "duly convicted" clause, and practically reinstituted slavery back into the Southern economy. White men would take advantage of these laws by searching for unemployed Black men and having them arrested for forced plantation labor. Even worse, White men would find a random Black man, claim that he owes him a debt and force him to work it off, essentially kidnapping him. The Black men couldn't simply take their kidnapper to court, as many courts were rigged in the White man's favor and would believe his words over the Black man. This was a form of "debt peonage," which was already outlawed in the country at this time, though ignored because it was currently only harming Black people. From these mass arrests came the birth of "chain gangs." 

    These Black Codes also included "apprentice laws," which allowed for the forced labor of Black children, laws prohibiting Black people from owning firearms and certain property, and from testifying in court cases not concerning other Black people. You would like to think that there were a few good people in the South who would be willing to pay Black Americans their due wages regardless of what society felt, but even this possibility was eliminated by the Black Codes, as they even consisted of "anti-encitement" measures. These laws were designed to punish those who offered higher wages to a Black laborer that was already under contract, illustrating how these Black Codes even went so far as to violate White people's right to give someone a fair wage in order to impede Black progress. 

    The Black Codes brought outrage in the North, prompting the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment, giving equal protection of the Constitution to former enslaved people and to allow Black men to vote, before rejoining the Union. This ushered in a period of Radical Reconstruction in which the 15th Amendment was passed and many Black men were elected to state governments in the South and to Congress. 

    Though the Black Codes were an egregious violation of human rights and inspired the laws that would create the Jim Crow era, they were crucial in the ushering in of Radical Reconstruction and thus the Reconstruction Amendments that are so important in protecting human rights today.