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The Black Codes were laws passed on the state and local level mainly in the rural Southern states in the United States to limit the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. While some northern states also passed legislation discriminating against African Americans before the Civil War, the term Black Codes is most commonly associated with legislation passed by Southern states after the Civil War in an attempt to control the labor, movements and activities of African Americans. There were signs posted in towns to keep blacks from integrating with the whites. These signs read "if black, stay back!"
[edit] HistoryThe Black Codes are most commonly associated with the Southern states after the American Civil War and the Reconstruction. They were used to regulate the freedoms of former slaves. In terms of laws that discriminated against African Americans, Black Codes developed over the span of half a century or more. Some laws dated to the early 19th century in Northern states. [edit] Expansion: 1830-1860As the abolitionist movement gained force and escape programs for slaves such as the Underground Railroad expanded, so was concern about African Americans heightened among some whites in the North. 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. All the slave states passed laws banning the marriage of whites and blacks, so-called anti-miscegenation laws, as did several new free states, including Indiana, Illinois and Michigan.[1] Indiana and Illinois shared borders with slave states. The southern population of their states had cultures that shared more values with the South across the Ohio River than did the northern parts. In several states the Black Codes were either incorporated into or required by their state constitutions, many of which were rewritten in the 1840s.[citation needed] Some black codes may include literacy tests,grandfather clause and many others. [edit] Post-Civil WarAfter the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, all former slave states adopted new Black Codes. During 1865 every southern state passed Black Codes that restricted the Freedmen, who were emancipated but not yet full citizens. While they pursued re-admission to the Union, the southern states provided freedmen with limited second-class civil rights and no voting rights. Southern plantation owners feared that they would lose their land. Having convinced themselves that slavery was justified, planters feared African Americans wouldn't work without coercion. The Black Codes were an attempt to control them and to ensure they did not claim social equality. Mississippi and South Carolina black codes have been detailed thus:[2]
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. After winning large majorities in the 1866 elections, the Republicans put the South under military rule. They held new elections in which the Freedmen could vote. Suffrage was also expanded to poor whites. The new governments repealed all the Black Codes, and they were never reenacted. [edit] SegregationAs 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," Leon F. 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, Litwack wrote, "was not racial integration but an informal code of exclusion and discrimination." "If they cannot (as they never can) occupy the places of legislators, judges, teachers, &c.," a North Carolina planter explained, "they may be useful as tillers of the soil, as handicraftsmen, as servants in various situations, and be happy in their domestic and family relations... It is our Christian duty to encourage them to these ends." That, Litwack wrote in Been in the Storm So Long was putting the best face on the legislation adopted by most of the ex-Confederate states to regulate freedmen —laws that came to be known collectively as the Black codes. Ended officially in 2000. [p. 366] [edit] Distinction from Jim Crow lawsThe Black Codes of the 1860s are not the same as the Jim Crow laws. The Black Codes were in reaction to the abolition of slavery and the South's defeat in the Civil War. Southern legislatures enacted them in the 1860s. The Jim Crow era began later, nearer to the end of the 19th century. [edit] See also
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