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Black code, in U.S. history, any of numerous laws enacted in the states of the former Confederacy after the Civil War and intended to assure the continuance of white supremacy. Enacted in 1865 and 1866, the laws had their roots in the slave codes that had formerly been in effect.
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Southern states enacted black codes after the Civil War to prevent African Americans from achieving political and economic autonomy.
As the Civil War came to a close, southern states began to pass a series of discriminatory state laws collectively known as black codes. While the laws varied in both content and severity from state to state—some laws actually granted freed people the right to marry or testify in court— these codes were designed to maintain the social and economic structure of racial slavery in the absence of the “peculiar institution.” The laws codified white supremacy by restricting the civic participation of freed people; the codes deprived them of the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to own or carry weapons, and, in some cases, even the right to rent or lease land.
Slavery had been a pillar of economic stability in the region before the war; now, black codes ensured the same stability by recreating the antebellum economic structure under the façade of a free-labor system. Adhering to new “apprenticeship” laws determined within the black codes, judges bound many young African American orphans to white plantation owners who would then force them to work. Adult freedmen were forced to sign contracts with their employers—who were oftentimes their previous owners. These contracts prevented African Americans from working for more than one employer, and therefore, from positively influencing the very low wages or poor working conditions they received.
These draconian state laws helped spur the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction into action. Its members felt that ending slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment did not go far enough. Northern outrage over the black codes helped to undermine support for Johnson’s policies, and by late 1866 control over Reconstruction had shifted to the radical wing of the Republican Party in Congress.
At that point, Congress extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau to combat the growing prevalence of black codes and in April 1866 passed the first Civil Rights Act, which established the citizenship of African Americans. This contradicted the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which declared that black people could never be citizens. President Johnson, who continued to insist that restoration of the United States had already been accomplished, vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Act. However, Congress overrode his veto. Congress would soon thereafter pass the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which aimed to protect African Americans from substandard treatment and enshrine their equal citizenship in the Constitution.
How did black codes maintain a social order similar to slavery?
Did the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Civil War Amendments adequately address racial inequality after the Civil War? Why or why not?
Oct 3, 2023 · Black Codes imposed harsh labor contracts on African American workers, limited their mobility, and denied them access to many public facilities. They were a precursor to the Jim Crow laws that would persist for decades, reinforcing racial segregation and inequality in the South.
- Randal Rust
The answer was to pass laws like the Black Codes that criminalized any attempt by Black men and women to break free from servitude. The result was what journalist Douglas Blackmon called "Slavery By Another Name" , the title of his 2008 book — namely the widespread practice of free Black men and women unjustly imprisoned, and then auctioned ...
- Dave Roos
The Code noir (French pronunciation: [kɔd nwaʁ], Black code) was a decree passed by King Louis XIV of France in 1685 defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire and served as the code for slavery conduct in the French colonies up until 1789 the year marking the beginning of the French Revolution.
Protesting Black Codes. After the abolishment of slavery in 1865, southern states passed laws known as Black Codes, which restricted the civil rights of newly freed African Americans and forced them to work for their former enslavers.
They responded by enacting the Black codes, laws that required African Americans to sign yearly labour contracts and in other ways sought to limit the freedmen’s economic options and reestablish plantation discipline. African Americans strongly resisted the implementation of these measures, and they seriously undermined Northern support for ...
