Essay On Black Codes

That’s where “black codes” played a decided role. Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama enacted first black codes, which were designed to severely restrict black freedom. In general, black codes were intended to do two specific things: 1.) maintain white supremacy; and 2.) secure a black labor supply. In effect, as Lawrence Friedman points out in “A History of American Law,” white southerners wanted to change things as little as possible after the Civil War (2005). So, already in 1865, every state of the old Confederacy passed black codes starting that year and picking up speed in 1866. These black codes established a caste system, which can be seen in the initial black codes in Mississippi. Those 1865 laws in Mississippi declared that blacks could work as laborers on farms and plantations owned by whites. No freed slave could own any farm land, and any black laborer who quit “without good cause” could be arrested and returned to his employer (Friedman, 2005, p. 382). Also, in Mississippi, blacks could not testify in cases where the plaintiffs and defendants were white. Intermarriage between the races was strictly forbidden. And blacks could not sit on juries (Friedman, 2005). Many people in the North found black codes unacceptable. That led Congress to enact a strong Civil Rights Act in 1866, and the South was put under military …show more content…
And they dealt with the problem by burning schools established by blacks to educate the children of ex-slaves. And they dealt with it by a continuing succession of black codes and practices that relegated blacks to a kind of peonage while finding ways to make sure they could only play a role in society by being bound laborers on white men’s land (Friedman, 2005). Among the black codes were a series of vagrancy laws which had the effect of maintaining strict control over