Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. On April ninth, eighteen sixty five, the long and bloody American Civil War finally came to an end. It had already been two years since President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, but after the Confederacy's surrender, words spread, if slowly, to the more than four million formerly enslaved black men, women, and children
that they were truly and officially free. White plantation owners, however, in league with Southern lawmakers and northern corporations, had other ideas. Starting with Mississippi and South Carolina, all white state legislatures passed a series of laws called the Black Codes, intent
on re enslaving people by essentially criminalizing being black. For the article this episode is based on how Stuff Work, spoke with T. Dion Bailey, a history professor at Colgate University who specializes in African American women's history and mass incarceration. She explained, White Southerners have a clear sense of how they want to restructure their society after the Civil War, and they're going to make sure that they do that
through these legal and extra legal means. The Black Codes, enacted in late eighteen sixty five and early eighteen sixty six, were devised to keep freed people in the South legally bound to plantations. With real emancipation, newly freed black people could strike out on their own, farming their own land
or applying a trade as a skilled artisan. The greatest fear of Southern cotton growers and their northern manufacturing partners was that with the end of slavery, they would lose access to the cheap or free and plentiful labor that
had made cotton a cash crop. The result was what journalist Douglas Blackman called slavery by another name, which is the title of his two thousand eight book, namely, the widespread practice of free black men and women unjustly imprisoned and then auctioned off to plantations and corporations to work
off their fines. Vagrancy laws were common in the nineteenth century, giving local sheriffs the authority to arrest vagrants who were unemployed, hanging out on the street and potentially looking for trouble. But the Black Codes in states like Mississippi and South Carolina created a whole new category of vagrancy that only applied to black people. Bailey said, after the Civil War, the South was destroyed, there was no infrastructure left. You have poor whites and newly freed blacks, and a lot
of people didn't have jobs. But these vagrancy laws specifically attacked African Americans. According to these codes, any black person who didn't have a work contract as a servant for a white master could be arrested for vagrancy. That meant that no black person could farm for themselves or work independently as a blacksmith or carpenter. They had to work for a white person, often the very same person who
formerly enslaved them, or go to jail. Poor white people, on the other hand, might be charged with the vagrancy, but the court's customarily waived any fines, hard labor, or other punishments. But a black person arrested for vagrancy under the Black Codes would enter a cycle of forced labor from which there was little hope of escape. At first, they would be hit with a fine so exorbitant that they'd never be able to pay it. Then they'd be hired out to a planter who would pay the vagrants
wages directly to the state. Once a black person was convicted of vagrancy, there was no incentive for former slave masters to ever set them free. Bailey said, your labor is costing almost nothing. They don't have to clothe you. They only have to feed you enough to keep you alive. And there's a sense that even if one vagrant dies, you could get another under this guise of vagrancy. They
knew it was an unlimited source of black bodies. The U. S. Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, formally abolishing slavery in January of eighteen sixty five, before the end of the Civil War, but the amendment contains a gaping loophole that the Black
Codes were quick to exploit. The Thirteenth Amendment states, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
So slavery was abolished except when it was a punishment for a crime, which is why the Black Codes made black vagrancy a crime, and why young black children would be forcibly removed from their parents under the guise of negligence and then apprenticed to a white planter for no pay. Bailey said this was a legal system set up to not only mimic slavery, but to re enslave all these newly freed men, women and children, and it effectively did.
Tens of thousands of black people were leased by the state to planters, miners, corporations, and others to pay off these debts. Formerly enslaved people were afforded some new rights under the Black Codes too. They could own land and property, They could legally marry the only other black people, and they could sue, be sued, and testify in court, though not against white people. But those few rights primarily served to give freed people the legal standing to get in trouble.
Bailey said, Southern lawmakers try to hide this under the guise of well, you do have some rights. You can marry, you can testify in court, but only if it was a person of their race. A black person could never take recourse against a person they worked for who was taking advantage of them or who didn't pay them. The
Black Codes were short lived. The US Congress, frustrated with attempts by Southern lawmakers to sidestep Reconstruction passed the Civil Rights Act of eighteen sixty six, which affirmed that black Americans must be afforded the same civil rights as white Americans. In the wake of this act, the federal government imposed what's known as radical reconstruction on the former Confederate States.
During this time, black men were given the right to vote and run for political office, and thousands of public schools opened across the South to serve black children. The Black Codes were nullified, but their legacy would echo down. Bailey said, the Black Codes laid the framework for how this whole system is going to work for the next
a hundred years. Jim Crow laws, enacted in the South in the eighteen nineties and lasting all the way to the civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and sixties, made it illegal for black and white people to share any public facilities, meaning that both groups had separate schools, libraries, hospitals, restaurants, et cetera, with black people received inferior facilities. Other laws required literacy tests and or poll taxes to be paid
before voting, all designed to disenfranchise poor African Americans. In that book Slavery by Another Name, journalist Blackman wrote about a black man named Green Cottonham who was arrested in night in Alabama for vagrancy, the same trumped up charge invented forty years earlier by the Black Codes. Cuttenham was auctioned off to the Northern Corporation U. S. Steele, who chained him in a Birmingham, Alabama coal mine and tasked him with mining eight tons of coal a day until
his fine was repaid. If he collapsed from malnourishment or fatigue, he'd be whipped, and if he died, he'd be buried in a shallow, unmarked grave with the rest. More than the thousand black men were toiling for U. S. Steel along with Cottenham in the same mine. In less than one year, sixty were dead from disease, accidents or homicide.
Even today, over a hundred years later, thousands of prisoners in the US, mostly Black and Latino, perform work for some very large corporations and are paid less than a dollar an hour. And it was all set in motion by the Black Codes. Today's episode is based on the article Slavery under another name, What Were the Black Codes? On how Stuff Works dot Com, written by Dave Rouse Brain Stuff's production of I heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Clang.
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