BLACK CODES After Reconstruction in 1865, the period in which slaves were emancipated, great fear came over slave-masters because of how it affected their control over the freed slaves. So Southern states sought to impose upon the legislature to enact Black Codes, codes supported by law that restricted free blacks from the enjoyment of life that was for centuries enjoyed by whites. Essentially, the Black Codes denied equality and political rights to blacks. Noted author and historian Eric Foner writes: Along with denying blacks equality and political rights, the Black Codes required all African Americans to sign yearly labor contracts each January. Those who failed to do so could be arrested as vagrants and fined; if they proved unable to pay, they could be auctioned off to an employer who would pay their fines, and then forced to work to reimburse him. . . . . Among additional prohibitions, All these measures were enforced by a flagrantly biased political and legal system in which African Americans had no voice, and by all-white police forces and state militias. . . . No jury in Georgia, reported a Freedmens Bureau agent, would convict a white man for killing a freedman, or fail to hang a black man who killed a white in self-defense. Blacks, commented another agent, would be just as well off with no law at all or no Government, as with the legal system established in the South under Andrew Johnson. If you call this Freedom, wrote one black veteran, what do you call Slavery? . . . . Events in the South in 1865 profoundly affected the political climate in the North. The freedpeoples unexpected militancy in demanding civil rights, the vote, and land appears to have thoroughly alarmed Johnson, propelling him into an alliance with the planter class he at first hoped to marginalize during Reconstruction. Reports of atrocities against the freedpeople - murders, whippings, the burning of schools and churches - and the enactment of the Black Codes by the new state governments Johnson had created led many northern Republicans to doubt whether the white South was genuinely prepared to accept the reality of emancipation. (See Eric Foners book Forever Free, Vintage, 2005, New York, pp. 96, 109.) Additional note: In the Prologue of Foners book (p. xix), he writes: The struggles of Reconstruction remain an important part of our present and future. As James Baldwin has written, History does not merely refer to the past . . . history is literally present in all we do. In that sense, Reconstruction remains an inspiration for those who hope to build a freer and more equal America. PLEASE SHARE Thanks!
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 18:14:06 +0000
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