Black Codes re-emerged while the nation celebrated the Declaration’s centennial

Evidence

In 1875, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racist discrimination in public places and public facilities, including those that provided transportation or food. But the following year, when nine million people, or one-fifth of the U.S. population, attended the centennial of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, celebrated as a monument to that “palladium of our nation’s liberties,” another series of Black Codes was already restricting the rights of Black people to work and live in Southern states. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1273

Categorization

• XREF: The centennial-celebration-while-Black-Codes-restrict juxtaposition is exactly the origin-story-as-infrastructure theme: what a nation dates itself from (the Declaration) determines what it counts as deviation.
• CANDY: The coincidence — a fifth of the population celebrating liberty at the very moment new Black Codes took effect — is a crisp, striking fact for conversation.