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The Black Codes Of The Reconstruction Era

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The Black Codes of the Reconstruction Era were a set of discriminatory laws imposed on newly-freed African Americans in Southern states, with the intention of limiting their freedom and opportunities. These codes served as a means for white people to maintain their power and racial superiority, as they imposed restrictive measures such as denying Black people the right to own property, criminalized minor offenses, and limited their access to white settlements. The Black Codes represented a regression of freedom and a continuation of oppression for African Americans, even after slavery had officially ended. With this said, the Black Codes of the Reconstruction Era represent a contraction of freedom for African Americans, as they imposed restrictive …show more content…

In Southern states, white people maintained their power by limiting the right of free Black people to testify in court. According to a Black code set in Tennessee in 1865, “No negro shall be a competent witness in any case where a white person is a party.” This policy was a clear demonstration of white supremacy, restricting the legal rights of African Americans and preventing them from being able to dispute any wrongdoings from white citizens in the justice system. This limitation of rights further highlighted the oppressive nature of the Black Codes, which were designed to maintain the social and economic power of white people in the South. It was an extremely effective way of upholding an unequal power dynamic, where whites had the power. This law reinforced the notion that white people were superior to Black people in the eyes of the law, thus creating a systemic issue of racial inequality in the Reconstruction era. By banning Black people from voting in 1870, the Florida Black codes also set a major path for racism during Reconstruction. They stated, “No freedman, free Negro, or mulatto shall have the right to vote at any election provided for by the laws of this State.” By banning Black people from voting in 1870, the Florida Black Codes made it clear that African Americans still did not have the same rights as white people, even after emancipation. Not only did this deny Black people the right to vote and participate in their own government, it also served as a powerful reminder of the oppression they had suffered and continued to suffer. The language used in the codes demonstrates a clear attempt to frame the Black Codes as an act of protection for white people and an attempt to prevent African Americans from gaining any power or influence in the South. Ultimately, the Black

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In document B the Black codes were created to maintain and attempt to keep everyone safe once slaves were free but, it did not have the aura of doing so. Instead it did not provide the enslaved with the freedom they were supposed to get. The Black Codes were actually restricting and limiting them even more than they were when they were enslaved. From document C, a statement from Henry ADams, who was a former slave, stated that " They were going to kill every colored person they found leaving their masters" this shows how whites continued to mistreat the freedmen as if they were still owned even after the civil war ended, in 1865. The fact that he had experienced this personally makes his words and statement even more important than others.

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In Document B,¨Black Codes¨ it states,¨These laws laid out what freed blacks were and were not allowed to do.¨ This document came from a first hand account of what laws from the Black Codes were and shows the amount of things that newly freed African Americans were and were not able to do. Although the new laws and new Reconstruction Amendments help with an African Americans freedom, people discriminating used Black Codes as a way to stay in control of African Americans and their freedom and got away with taking away some of their civil rights with the use of Black Codes. Black codes were a common way that people discriminating used to go past and around new set laws. Whites and people discriminating also used the exploitation known as sharecropping

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This code causes an increase in tension among the slaves and free negroes because this code was being followed it oppressed those negros who could we read and write. This code can be considering pre – Jim Crow laws at least for a more modern-day comparison. This tension gave birth Toussaint L'Ouverture and other former slave to start the rally call to abolish slavery in Haiti. This revolution changed who lead the country of Haiti and introduced the concept of self-determination to Haiti. The lives of blacks and mulatto begin to change around the because in October 26 1795, the National Convention in France dissolved all the issues they had with Haiti and gave a general emancipation to all blacks and mulattos alike.

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Blacks were denied the right to vote by grandfather clauses (laws that restricted the right to vote to people whose ancestors had voted before the Civil War), poll taxes (fees charged to poor Blacks), white primaries (only Democrats could vote, only Whites could be Democrats), and literacy tests ("Name all the Vice Presidents and Supreme Court Justices throughout America's history"). Plessy sent this message to southern and border states: Discrimination against Blacks is acceptable. The Jim Crow laws and system of etiquette were undergirded by violence, real and threatened. Blacks who violated Jim Crow norms, for example, drinking from the White water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, their

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For years, laws have justified white supremacy in America, and the oppression of black people as well. Before there were Jim Crow laws, there were black codes. Before there were black codes, there were slave codes. These three things were all used to provide white people with a sense of supremacy and protection, while subjugating and oppressing black people. Slave codes began in 1705 to validate the treatment of black slaves and to divide and conquer.

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Youseph Anwar AFPRL Midterm Essay Compare and contrast the various laws and codes which were put into place in the American south during the Post Reconstruction era with the perceived treatment of people of African descent in the United States by the American criminal justice system, court decisions and legislation related to voting, and law enforcement officers today, as seen in the news media and social media. In the American South during the Post Reconstruction era, many laws and codes were put into place in order to limit and keep African Americans from progressing in society. Legislation such as The Black Codes, Jim Crow laws and US Supreme Court cases such as Plessy v Ferguson sought to limit the newly freed African Americans in order to maintain control of the South. To this day there is still institutional racism and injustice in the case of black people and there is still room for improvement in the position of black people in society.

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For example, the Virginia slave codes state that the status of a child will be determined by the status of their mother (Virginia Slave Codes). As a result of this, many slave owners would abuse their slaves sexually in order to gain more slaves oppose to buying more. In addition to this, the slave codes helped solidify the condition of slavery on slaves through laws that only gave freed slaves 6 months to leave the state of South Carolina or else they would once again face enslavement (South Carolina Slave Codes). Moreover, the codes of South Carolina and Virginia also attempted to solidify the position of slaves by clearly laying out the consequences for slaves that ran away likely as a means of intimidation. In brief, the slave codes that there were created in places such as South Carolina and Virginia also came with intent of better defining slavery, as well as the goal to prohibit slaves from being

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Black Codes and Jim Crow laws were created using loopholes in the Amendments. For example, the Thirteenth Amendment states that slavery is abolished "except as a punishment for crime" ("Constitution of the United States," art. 13, sec 1). As a result, laws were passed to enforce segregation and limit the freedom of African Americans. Breaking these laws resulted in forced labor, basically reinstating parts of the slavery system.

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These codes varied based on the states, but included aspects such as denying African Americans the right to vote, serve on juries, testify in court against southern whites, own property, attend public schools, and also included a mandate where they were forced to work low income, non-desirable jobs. This was not at all a more desirable situation for the freedmen in the south than they had when they were enslaved, so they had to turn again to the Northern leadership for help. At a convention in Alexandria, Virginia, a group of black men urged the North to help because they stood side by side with each other and fought for the same things in the war, and that nothing but military protection would protect the freedmen from falling back into what southern whites believed to be “their rightful

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As the year turned into 1900, the South passed law after law that disenfranchise African Americans and enforced even more racial segregation in public facilities. One of the most cruel acts performed against blacks was death by lynching. Often white vigilantes, including the “red-shirts,” will accuse blacks for various crimes. Rather than waiting for the police or the law to deal the punishment, the vigilantes will take matters into their own hands and lynch the blacks themselves. As a result, an average of one hundred African Americans were lynched every year.

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The codes stated that even though people of color have some rights, they are not entitled to the same political or social equality of white people. The code stated that if a person of color made a contract for labor /service or such thing, they would be known as servants, and the one with the contract

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515 Words | 3 Pages

The reconstruction period was a failure because African Americans, mainly males, were not treated with equality although the constitution said that the they were free and had the right to vote, be educated and had the right to liberty, life and the pursuit to happiness. Organizations, like the KKK, were created to harm freed slaves and their families. Laws were created such as the Black Codes restricting former slaves from their rights. African Americans endured a lot of violence over the years. “In Grayson, Texas, a white man and two friends murdered three former slaves because the wanted to ‘ thin the niggers out and drive them to their hole’”.

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But, when these officials were elected to Congress, they passed the “black codes” and thus the relations between the president and legislators became worst (Schriefer, Sivell and Arch R1). These so called “Black Codes” were “a series of laws to deprive blacks of their constitutional rights” that they were enacted mainly by Deep South legislatures. Black Codes differ from a state to another but they were stricter in the Deep South as they were sometimes irrationally austere. (Hazen 30) Furthermore, with the emergence of organizations such as the Red Shirts and the White League with the rise of the Conservative White Democrats’ power, efforts to prevent Black Americans from voting were escalating (Watts 247), even if the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S constitution that gave the Blacks the right to vote had been ratified in 1870.

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Right? “The Mississippi Black Codes of 1865” demonstrates that white southerners were not on board with this “New America” and would do anything possible, legal or not, to

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308 Words | 2 Pages

could not own property; • Slaves could not leave the plantation without permission” (p. 194). Slave Codes were wrongly enforced on free slaves in the North who had paid for their freedom with extra labor. Southerners thought that free African Americans were a nuisance and threat to slavery (Banks, 2003). According to Harris (1992), during the 1700s, free African Americans and African American slaves began to believe that they would have a better chance at equality and emancipation if they were able to read.

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