Black Codes (United States)
The Black Codes, also called the Black Laws, were racially segregationist and discriminatory U.S. state laws that limited the freedom of Black Americans but not of White Americans. The first Black Codes applied to “free Negroes,” i.e., black people who lived in states where slavery had been abolished or who lived in a slave state but were not enslaved. After chattel slavery was abolished throughout the United States in 1865, former slave states in the U.S. South enacted Black Codes to restrict all black citizens, especially the emancipated freedmen who were no longer subject to control by slaveholders.
Since the colonial period, colonies and states had passed laws that discriminated against free Blacks. In the South, these were generally included in “slave codes”; the goal was to suppress the influence of free blacks (particularly after slave rebellions) because of their potential influence on slaves. Free men of color were denied the vote in the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835. Laws prohibited activities such as bearing arms, gathering in groups for worship, and learning to read and write.
In 1832, James Kent wrote that “in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights.”
Before the war, the Northern states that had prohibited slavery also enacted laws similar to the slave codes and the later Black Codes: Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and New York enacted laws to discourage free blacks from residing in those states. They were denied equal political rights, including the right to vote, the right to attend public schools, and the right to equal treatment under the law. Some of the Northern states which had such laws repealed them around the same time that the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished by constitutional amendment.
In the first two years after the Civil War, white legislatures passed Black Codes modeled after the earlier slave codes. (The name “Black Codes” was given by “negro leaders and the Republican organs”, according to historian John S. Reynolds.) Black Codes were part of a larger pattern of Democrats trying to maintain political dominance and suppress the freedmen, newly emancipated African-Americans. They were particularly concerned with controlling movement and labor of freedmen, as slavery had been replaced by a free labor system. Although freedmen had been emancipated, their lives were greatly restricted by the Black Codes. The defining feature of the Black Codes was broad vagrancy law, which allowed local authorities to arrest freed people for minor infractions and commit them to involuntary labor. This period was the start of the convict lease system, also described as “slavery by another name” by Douglas Blackmon in his 2008 book of this title.
