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The Civil War was fought by the Southern states to maintain white supremacy and slavery, even though some may claim otherwise. The efforts to rewrite the history of the Civil War, even so shortly after it, were not lost on Civil War veterans. Although the Union victory granted many freedoms to freed slaves, the failure of Reconstruction set the stage for violent white supremacy that survives to this day. Slaves in the Southern states had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, but such an unpopular law in the South would have to be enforced against the tyranny of Southern Democrats. Radical Republicans had expelled all Southern Democrats and former Confederates from Congress, which was why they were able to enfranchise freedmen through a series of amendments and laws; as well as establish the Freedmen's Bureau to help newly freed slaves find housing, work, and an education. For a brief moment at the dawn of the modern age, America showed hope for what the young nation could be, that still inspires abolitionists to this day. Then power was returned to former Confederates and plantation owners in the South, kickstarting a century of terror.
The Black Codes, sometimes called Black Laws, were laws that discriminated against, disenfranchised, and persecuted Black Americans in the years before and after the Civil War. The best known of them were passed in 1865 and 1866 by Southern states, after the American Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and to compel them to work for low wages. Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and many Northern states had them, it was the Southern U.S. states that codified such laws in everyday practice. In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free coloured persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." As mentioned, Radical Republicans pushed for the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau, but the existence of Black Codes in Northern states as well as Southern would prove to undermine the goals of Reconstruction. Before the war, Northern states that had prohibited slavery and enacted laws similar to the slave codes and the later Black Codes used in the South: Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and New York enacted laws to discourage free blacks from residing in those states.
Since the colonial period, colonies and states had passed laws that discriminated against free Blacks. In the South, these were generally included in "slave codes"; the goal was to reduce the influence of free blacks (particularly after slave rebellions) because of their potential influence on slaves. Restrictions included prohibiting them from voting (although North Carolina had allowed this before 1831), bearing arms, gathering in groups for worship, and learning to read and write; which put them in direct conflict with Radical Republicans and the goals of the newly established Freedmen's Bureau. These laws violated the protections outlined in the Bill of Rights, but states used these laws was to preserve the institution of slavery and it’s inherent racism. They were denied equal political rights, including the right to vote, the right to attend public schools, and the right to equal treatment under the law. Some of the Northern states, those which had them, repealed such laws around the same time that the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished by constitutional amendment.
In the first two years after the Civil War, white-dominated Southern legislatures passed Black Codes modeled after the earlier slave codes. Black Codes were part of a larger pattern of whites trying to maintain political dominance and suppress the freedmen, newly emancipated African-American slaves. They were particularly concerned with controlling movement and labor of freedmen, as slavery had been replaced by a free labor system. Although freedmen had been emancipated, their lives were greatly restricted by the Black Codes. The defining feature of the Black Codes was broad vagrancy law, which allowed local authorities to arrest freedpeople for minor infractions and commit them to involuntary labor. This period was the start of the convict lease system, also described as "slavery by another name" and in conjunction with sharecropping, kept Black Americans in a state of repressed citizenry.
Sharecropping is legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. It became widespread in the South as a response to economic upheaval caused by the end of slavery during and after Reconstruction. Sharecropping was a way for poor farmers, both white and black, to earn a living from land owned by someone else. The landowner provided land, housing, tools and seed, and perhaps a mule, and a local merchant provided food and supplies on credit. At harvest time, the sharecropper received a share of the crop (from one-third to one-half, with the landowner taking the rest). The cropper used his share to pay off his debt to the merchant.
Following the Civil War of the United States, the South lay in ruins. The Emancipation Proclamation had technically already freed the slaves in the Southern states, but the thing about laws is that they have to be enforced. Plantations and other lands throughout the South were seized by the federal government, and thousands of former slaves, known as freedmen, found themselves free, yet without means to support their families. The situation was made more complex due to General William T. Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15, which in January 1865, announced he would temporarily grant newly freed families 40 acres of land on the islands and coastal regions of Georgia. This policy gave rise to a popular saying of the time: "Forty Acres and a Mule".
Sharecroppers worked a section of the plantation independently, usually growing cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, and other cash crops, and receiving half of the profit. Sharecroppers also often received their farming tools and all other goods from the landowner they were contracted with. Landowners dictated decisions and were therefore able to to manipulated prices and keep sharecroppers in a cycle of debt, wherein they can’t afford to do anything except continue accepting Landowners terms. Sharecropping often proved economically problematic, as the landowners held significant economic control.
By the early 1930s, there were 5.5 million white tenants, sharecroppers, and mixed cropping/laborers in the United States; and 3 million blacks. In Tennessee, whites made up two thirds or more of the sharecroppers. In Mississippi, by 1900, 36% of all white farmers were tenants or sharecroppers, while 85% of black farmers were. In Georgia, fewer than 16,000 farms were operated by black owners in 1910, while, at the same time, African Americans managed 106,738 farms as tenants. Sharecropping continued to be a significant institution in Tennessee agriculture for more than 60 years after the Civil War, peaking in importance in the early 1930s.
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. These laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Southern Democrat-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by black people during the Reconstruction period. The Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965.
Jim Crow laws required racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America and in some others, beginning in the 1870s. Jim Crow laws were upheld in 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the U.S. Supreme Court laid out its "separate but equal" legal justification that was used on trains and buses and used in restaurants and other public facilities.
See also:
Clinton Massacre 1875 - ZinnEdu
Jim Crow laws and Jim Crow state constitutional provisions mandated the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains between white and black people. The U.S. military was already segregated. President Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat, initiated the segregation of federal workplaces in 1913.
In 1954, segregation of public schools (state-sponsored) was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education. In some states, it took many years to implement this decision, while the Supreme Court continued to rule against the Jim Crow laws in other cases. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Convict leasing was a system of forced labor for prisoners, or people in jail. It allowed prisons to rent the labor of their prisoners for profit. Historically, it was used in the Southern United States and overwhelmingly targeted African-American men. Convict leasing provided prisoner labor to private parties, such as plantation owners and corporations. The state of Louisiana leased out convicts as early as 1844, but the system expanded all through the South with the emancipation of slaves at the end of the American Civil War in 1865. It could be lucrative for the states: in 1898, some 73% of Alabama's entire annual state revenue came from convict leasing. Corruption, lack of accountability, and racial violence resulted in "one of the harshest and most exploitative labor systems known in American history." African Americans, mostly adult males, due to "vigorous and selective enforcement of laws and discriminatory sentencing," made up the vast majority—though not all—of the convicts leased.
The writer Douglas A. Blackmon described the system: "It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery – a system in which armies of free men, guilty of made-up crimes (Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws) and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion."
Convict leasing has made a return in recent years with the emergence of private prisons in the United States. Many corporations and state institutions have been using convict lease programs to profit. Recently, convict leasing has been used in California to fight wildfires even though it was outlawed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. With private companies able to profit from the free labor of prisoners, it incentivizes the arrest and incarceration of large numbers of people.
In the United States and Canada, redlining is the systematic denial of various services by federal government agencies, local governments as well as the private sector either directly or through the selective raising of prices. Neighborhoods with a high proportion of minority residents are more likely to be redlined than other neighborhoods with similar household incomes. While the best known examples of redlining have involved denial of financial services such as banking or insurance, other services such as health care. In the 1960s, sociologist John McKnight coined the term "redlining" to describe the discriminatory practice of fencing off areas where banks would avoid investments based on community demographics. For example, in Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend to lower-income whites but not to middle-income or upper-income black Americans.
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