White resistance persisted via color-blind punitive policies replacing overt racial terrorism

Evidence

This appetite for harsh punishment has echoed across the decades. Many of the well-dressed Christians and clergy members who took part in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott were beaten, battered, and bloodied in nonviolent civil rights protests. By the 1960s it was less acceptable to employ the same forms of extralegal racial terrorism that had been used to constrain previous forms of Black protest. But white resistance to racial equality remained strong. A new politics of fear and anger emerged and gave rise to the era of mass incarceration. Richard Nixon’s war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, children tried as adults, “broken windows” policing—these policies were not as expressly racialized as the Black Codes, but their implementation involved many of the same features. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 851

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s case study goal: this is the reframing argument’s continuity claim — Black Codes and mass incarceration as one continuous apparatus, not separate eras. — connects to: Antibusing forces framed their cause as upholding Brown’s color-blind principle rather than as resistance. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 99; Colorblind national-security pretexts let courts uphold racial bans they reject elsewhere — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 640; Colorblind antiracialism gains force only after partial antiracist gains begin succeeding — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 123
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the strong empirical claim that facially neutral policies replicated Black-Code features in implementation — central to historian objections about causation.