Black Codes
Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War. Even though the Union triumph had released nearly 4 million enslaved individuals, the topic of freed blacks' status in the postwar South remains unanswered. Many states ordered Black people to sign yearly labor contracts under black codes; if they refused, they risked being jailed, fined, and forced to work for free. Outrage over the black codes harmed President Andrew Johnson's and the Republican Party's popularity. They were created by white lawmakers in the South in the legislatures of the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
The first of the Black Codes passed in Mississippi on November 22, 1865, following the end of the Civil War(April 12,1861-May 10,1865) during the Reconstruction Era. Under Black Codes, the Civil Rights of freedom were restricted in Black Codes and unequal to the Civil Rights of whites. The Black codes enforced a series of requirements that included poll taxes, property qualifications, and literacy tests. Some black codes were white primary, poll tax, literacy tests, grandfather clause, and property ownership required to vote.
The black codes enacted immediately after the American Civil War, though varying from state to state, were all intended to secure a steady supply of cheap labor, and all continued to assume the inferiority of the freed slaves. There were vagrancy laws that declared a black person to be vagrant if unemployed and without permanent residence; a person so defined could be arrested, fined, and bound out for a term of labor if unable to pay the fine.
These laws limited property ownership, regulated labor, denied legal rights in courts, established curfews, and upheld corporal punishment. The purpose was to retain the social structure of the South (how it was before the Civil War). The purpose of the black codes was to regain control over freed slaves and inhibit the freedom of freed slaves. Most codes were based on vagrancy law. They had to prove they had a job and that job was recognized by whites. This led to a system of penalties and punishments including Convict Leasing that put freed slaves back into forced labor on the plantations.
The restrictive nature of the codes and widespread Black resistance to their enforcement enraged many in the North, who argued that the codes violated the fundamental principles of free labor ideology. After passing the Civil Rights Act (over Johnson’s veto), Republicans in Congress effectively took control of Reconstruction. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment —which granted “equal protection” of the Constitution to formerly enslaved people—and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union.
It was Northern reaction to the black codes (as well as to the bloody antiblack riots in Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1866; see New Orleans Race Riot) that helped produce Radical Reconstruction (1865–77) and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Freedmen’s Bureau was created in 1865 to help the former slaves. Reconstruction did away with the black codes, but, after Reconstruction ended in 1877, many of their provisions were reenacted in the Jim Crow laws, which were not finally done away with until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvWVX84RBt4
^^The video above will give a little overview of what Black Codes are.
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