Post-emancipation Black Codes criminalized work refusal and reestablished forced labor

Evidence

Some of the Black Codes foreshadowed Jim Crow laws by policing the movement of Black people, whose recent emancipation had become a perpetual source of fear and resentment. These codes segregated schools and prohibited, for example, interracial seating in the first-class sections of railroad cars. Other codes were intended to establish systems of peonage resembling slavery to ensure a cheap labor force. Vagrancy laws were adopted and selectively enforced against Black people; these essentially made it a criminal offense not to work, often forcing formerly enslaved people to sign labor contracts with the same people who had once enslaved them. Simply being Black and standing on a street corner could be interpreted as idleness or vagrancy by the police and result in arrest. In several states, convict leasing laws allowed the hiring out of people in county prisons to plantation owners and private companies in an unsubtle effort to establish another system of forced labor. In the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Codes spoke for themselves…. No open-minded student can read them without being convinced they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 384

Categorization

• XREF: This is a concrete empirical claim useful to the reader’s case study—distinguishing the factual description of Black Codes from the reframing thesis. Connects to the broader literature on convict leasing (e.g., Douglas Blackmon’s ‘Slavery by Another Name’). — connects to: Vagrancy laws effectively criminalized male unemployment and homelessness — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3285; Late-twentieth-century law decriminalized what Victorian vice laws had criminalized — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4293