Equality for All: An In-Depth Analysis of Black Reconstruction
The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. - W.E.B Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America
In the work 'Equality for All: Black Reconstruction Essay' we will raise the issue of equality in America between blacks and whites and what path to overcome this issue. Is it possible to be enslaved in freedom? Many African Americans young and old would be able to tell you yes. The Thirteenth Amendment was passed over a hundred years ago and African Americans still have not experienced “true freedom”. After the Thirteenth Amendment was passed in 1865 Congress believed the problem had been solved. This left James A. Garfield with a question of his own: “What is freedom? Is it the bare privilege of not being chained? … If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion”.
The Reconstruction era was an interesting time for the United States as a whole, especially in the South. African Americans had gone from being property or three-eighths of a person to being free citizens in the United States. White Americans were not ready to deal with this sort of change. The Emancipation caused a lot of African Americans to migrate in the United States, especially in the South. Hundreds of newly free women and men were flooding in excited to experience their new freedom, but even in freedom African Americans learned that they were still very much not wanted in society.
In terms of South African Americans moved to the countryside but were soon chased out of their homes by White Americans who felt that they should not be there. So, they began to migrate into the cities which caused an uproar; the city was believed to not be a place for minorities. It was believed that the newly freed slaves needed to be on the farms as they were in slavery. The newspaper the Montgomery Daily Ledger published a statement saying, “Our advice to them is to go into the country and cultivate the soil, the employment God designed to them for and which they must do or starve.”
White Americans felt as if African Americans posed a threat to their community and were incapable of being free women and men. They perceived them to have the mental capacity of children. Children need to be controlled; if left unattended they will become wild and lazy. The author George Rose warns the Southern cities that without control there will be crowds of strong lazy black men with their filthy women and their dirty neglected children in their streets. Congress needed to find a solution to keep control and Black Codes was the perfect solution. Black Codes were a legally enforceable way to maintain white supremacy and to control the stagnancy in the African American community. The reason why Black Codes were able to be enforced for so long was because of the many Americans who felt this way in powerful positions such as legislatures, police officers, and judges. In a written statement for the case of State v. Harden South Carolina’s Court of Appeals Judge John B. O'Neill said:
“Free Negroes belong to the degraded caste of society; they are in no respect on an equality with a white man. According to their condition, they ought to by law be compelled to demean themselves as inferiors, from whom submission and respect to the whites, in all their intercourse in society, is demanded; I have always thought while on the circuit ruled that words of impertinence and insolence addressed by a negro to a white man, would justify an assault and battery”.
Another judge from North Carolina by name of Judge Richmond M. Pearson shared the same opinion in his written statement in State v. Jowers saying how unfortunate it is that such a third class such as African Americans exists with there being no master to correct them unless there is a white man with the judicial power to stop it. He continues to explain they must pull principles from the common law to enforce the judicial power.
Black Codes were restrictive laws that limited the freedom of African Americans in their daily life, maintain white supremacy, and kept African Americans as cheap labor. In William Cohen’s Negro Involuntary Servitude in the South, he explains that from the legal standpoint the system, created from Black Codes, compromised a variety of state laws directed to making it extremely possible for the local government and individuals to take and hold black labor at their will. The Reconstruction era became modern-day slavery. During the Reconstruction era, there were a few “rights” that were granted to African Americans but even those “rights” were limited. African Americans were granted the right to sue but the person they were suing could not be a white person, yet African Americans were able to be sued by white Americans. African Americans were now able to inherit and buy property but only certain property. Most times African Americans needed official permission to inherit or buy property. When it came to contracts African Americans were able to make contracts but they were most times not able to make more than one contract, especially employment contracts.
Black Codes or also known as Black laws were enacted right after the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. Soon after the Fourteenth Amendment was passed. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and any involuntary servitude unless the person was convicted of a crime while the Fourteenth Amendment granted rightful citizenship to people of all color and backgrounds as long as the person was born in the United States. A lot of states, mostly Southern states, were able to enforce their own Black Codes such as Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Black codes were able to be passed more easily in these states without any federal overview since Andrew Johnson believed in more cooperative federalism meaning that the federal government should not have the jurisdiction to have a say in State’s rights and statutes.
Mississippi was the first to enact the Black Codes in 1865. Following Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana the same year. While Virginia, Florida, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas didn’t enact their Black Codes until 1866. For the most part, Black Codes dealt with employment, enticement, and vagrancy. To maintain white supremacy legislatures had to make sure African Americans could not obtain occupations that would lead them into wealth. African American men had to be in contract with a white man to prove to law enforcement that he was indeed employed. In Mississippi, there was a law that required African Americans to have written evidence of their employment every year at the beginning of January.
If they failed to show their evidence of employment or left before their contract was over, they would have to surrender all their earlier wages or be arrested. During the Reconstruction era, White Southerners wanted to keep African Americans as cheap labor. To ensure this South Carolina created a law that prohibited African Americans from having any other occupation than farmer or servant unless they were able to pay an annual tax of $10 - $100. African Americans were prohibited from going into occupations dealing with politics or business.
According to the Law Dictionary vagrancy is the status given to a person who travels from place to place, does not work, and loiters around with no means of support. African Americans were not to go without a job nor were they able to stand around the streets without being under the suspicion of vagrancy and at risk of being arrested. Usually, when African Americans were charged with vagrancy, they were made to pay a fine, and most times they were unable to which then would lead to an arrest. In the Richmond Times June edition, it stated “If severe penal legislation shall become necessary to prevent the free negro from beginning a vagabond and thief the legislature will provide the remedy.”
To make sure that all African Americans earned the same amount of money States made laws to prevent enticement. In the legal dictionary, the definition of enticement is: “An act by which one person leads or moves another by persuasion or influence, as to some action or state of mind”. These ensured the promise that employers would be able to keep African Americans at their disposal. African Americans were not able to have a contract with more than one employer. If a man were to get into a contract with another employer, he faced the consequences of a fine or being imprisoned.
In terms of enticement William Cohen says:
“Enticement statutes established the proprietary claims of employers to “their” Negroes by making it a crime to hire away a laborer under contract to another man. Emigrant-agent laws assessed prohibitive license fees against those who made their living by moving labor from one state to another, and a variety of contract-enforcement statutes virtually legalized peonage. In some cases, contract legislation went still further and made it a criminal offense to break a labor contract even when no debt was involved”.
Black Codes created a huge impact on a great number of things such as Jim Crow, Mass incarceration, and segregation. Black Codes paved the way for Jim Crow to exist. For many historians, Black Codes and Jim Crow go hand-in-hand since they happened so close to each other. Black Codes never truly ended; Jim Crow was just a continuation of those laws but on a much more bigger scale. Jim Crow laws created segregation officially. Jim Crow started around 1877 after the Reconstruction era. After the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1895, the Court decided that “separate but equal” was acceptable. Lawmakers were now able to make laws containing race; something lawmakers were not necessarily able to do during the Reconstruction era. As long as African Americans were given the “same opportunities” as White Americans then it wasn’t seen as discriminatory. Jim Crow became so powerful the laws were able to last well into the 1970s. These laws may not exist today, but we are still feeling the effects.
Mass incarceration has been a reoccurring problem since the Reconstruction era due to the loophole of the Thirteenth Amendment. As I mentioned earlier the Thirteenth Amendment is the amendment that abolished slavery and officially set African Americans free. To hold on to some form of slavery white legislators made it possible for a person to be sentenced into involuntary servitude as long as that person had been convicted of a crime. African Americans were arrested for just about anything so they could be used as cheap labor. In Richmond, Virginia there was a study done to calculate the number of arrests made between African Americans and white Americans.
The study focused on the time frame of December 1865 to April 1866. Only about three hundred white citizens were arrested compared to the 500 African American citizens arrested. In the twenty-five years after that study white arrests never outnumbered African American arrests. The courts and states depended on African Americans being incarcerated. After there is only one white person scheduled to be arraigned for trial during the last two weeks of the May 1877 session the editor of the County Superior Court wrote that without African American offenders, “our courts now would have little to do”.
The court systems also did not trust African Americans, so a lot of the State’s court systems were recreated to be racially segregated. White men thought of crimes that they believed only African Americans would want to commit, like rebellion, arson, burglary, assaulting a white woman, and murder, and charged them with harsher penalties than white men. African Americans’ punishments for misdemeanors were also harsher than white citizens. Punishments for misdemeanors usually resulted in public whippings or being hired out to someone.
Racial violence during this period took place in three major forms: interpersonal violence, vigilante groups, and urban riots. The political violence that followed from Black Codes during this time was horrific. White legislators used Black Codes to restore the “Old Order” while white citizens used terror to terrorize and control the former slaves. Many terrorist organizations, such as the Klu Klux Klan, White League in Louisiana, and Knights of White Camelia, formed the year after Black Codes were established. Their purpose was to obstruct and destroy the Reconstruction government, to assassinate or intimidate African Americans and white Republican political leaders, and to use violence.
Organizations like the Klu Klux Klan were known to set fire to African Americans' homes, beat men and boys to a pulp, or lynch them to send a message or maintain their white supremacy. There are many incidents of the Klan taking men or boys out of their homes, stripping them out of their clothes, and making them run down the street. Sometimes the Klan would have the men or the boys lie on a rock and each Klan member would whip them or while they burned a part of their bodies. If an African American got into any type of contract dispute with their employers or any dispute with any ordinary white citizen, they would get a visit from the Klan.
Violence was not just limited to just these few terrorist organizations white citizens also took matters into their own hands. African American men were beaten or shot for minor conflicts, labor disputes, long-standing grudges, and crimes of passion. A minor conflict such as accidentally bumping into a white man could cost an African American man his life. African Americans trying to get into politics or trying to vote would be beaten or lynched. African Americans received abuse from law enforcement and soldiers for minor reasons or for simply no reason at all. In the book Race Relations in the Urban South, a soldier by the name of John Dennett was walking with a fellow soldier down a street in Atlanta when the soldier told him: “I’m going to punch every d—d n----r I see.”
If an African American was accused of any crime white mobs would storm the jailhouses, drag them out, and lynch them from a street lamp. Most times this was before the accused were able to even see a judge or a trial. These mobs would beat these men and women to a pulp, lynch them, and then mutilate them. Accused African Americans would be burned at the stake while white onlookers laughed, smiled, cheered, or took pictures. At times if a white mob seemed to be hesitant to lynch the man a white woman would start yelling to fuel the crowd’s anger again.
The men and women lynched by the mobs were almost always innocent of what they were being accused of. In the book “100 Years of Lynching”, it displays numerous newspaper clippings of white mobs lynching African Americans, mostly African American men, for crimes they were accused of, and in many of those news articles the reporters point out the accused innocence. For example, a lynch mob near Mississippi City, Mississippi had lynched two African American men who they knew were innocent. A young schoolgirl had been murdered earlier in the week and the police had not yet found the suspect responsible for the crime. For reasons unknown, the lynch mob decided that these two young men needed to pay the price. This is why the topic of the 'reconstruction era essay' is relevant and important.
