Essay On Black Codes

“The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” said Lyndon Baynes Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, in a speech at Washington D.C.. From 1963 to 1969, Johnson fought to secure ballot rights for African Americans, rights that had been given to all races in the fifteenth amendment in 1870. Sixty six years later, Johnson was still fighting for rights that had already been granted. According to Johnson, the vote was supposed to bring about equality in ways that other laws could not. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Instead, even today, voting rights are being restricted based on race, and

Directly following the emancipation of the slaves, most southern states enacted “black codes”, or laws that discriminated against blacks in order to control every aspect of their lives ("Black Codes"). Although the codes varied state to state, they were unified in their success to create a subservient and dependable labor force after the loss of slave labor ("Black Codes"). In South Carolina, African Americans were confined in their choice of occupation to either a farmer or servant ("Black Codes"). All over the south, blacks were forced to sign labor contracts that would result in massive fines if broken ("Black Codes"). Since most African Americans were unable to pay the astronomical price of the fines, which could amount close to their earnings in one year, they were faced with unpaid labor to pay back the fine, imprisonment, or beatings ("Black Codes"). In courts, they could only testify against fellow blacks, giving them no power in the judiciary branch whatsoever ("Black Codes"). These black codes perpetually kept the African Americans in slavery. They had freedom on paper, but, unfortunately, this did not transfer into real life. Discrimination was the name of the