NYTimes Charles Blow Opinion

[David Lockmiller]

(09-05-2023 08:38 PM)AussieMick Wrote:  I suggest many blacks (who would later suffer and even been lynched in post-war South) . . . .

Michael

In the first two years after the Civil War, white legislatures passed Black Codes modeled after the earlier slave codes. The name "Black Codes" was given by "negro leaders and the Republican organs", according to historian John S. Reynolds. Black Codes were part of a larger pattern of Democrats trying to maintain political dominance and suppress the freedmen, newly emancipated African-Americans.

They were particularly concerned with controlling movement and labor of freedmen, as slavery had been replaced by a free labor system.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" by Douglas Blackmon in his 2008 book of this title.

Source: Wikipedia - Black Codes (United States)