I everyone and welcome back to my channel BIG LEARNING.
In todays video we a very special
and controversial topic: The Black Codes of the USA. Lets get started!
The black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and
ensure their ABEILABILITY as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil
War. They were intended to assure the continuance of white supremacy.
Assemblies passed laws to keep blacks in an inferior position. Such laws were in Southern
States They refused them to vote and said that they could not serve on juries, forbidding them
to give evidence against a white man in court.
Enacted in 1865 and 1866, the laws were designed to replace the social controls of slavery that
had been removed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the
Constitution.
Background
The black codes had their roots in the slave codes that had been in place previously. The basis
of slavery in the United States was the fact that slaves were property and, as such, had few or
no legal rights. When President EIbraham Lincoln announced the passage of the Amancipation
Proclamation in early 1863, the stakes of the Civil War shifted dramátically.
Then, as the war came to its end, Lincoln successor Andrew Johnson would be the one to start
the beginning of Reconstruction. Under his policies, the former Confederate states were
required to uphold the abolition of slavery , swear loyalty to the Union and pay off their war
debt.
Civil Rights Act (1866)
Despite opposition, in July 1866 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and set up an organization
called Freedmen’s Bureau. Both measures were intended to ensure that black rights in the
South were not cheated. Part of this act became part of the Fourteenth Amendment, which
was introduced to give black full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote. It declared all
persons born in the United States to be citizens, "without distinction of race or color, or
previous condition of slavery or invOluntary servitude."
Reconstruction
All the former Confederate states except Tennessee refused to accept the 14th Amendment,
so Congress replied by passing the Reconstruction Act. In this way, the white governments
were removed until they accepted it.
By 1870 all the southern states had new “Reconstruction” governments made up of blacks and
white men from the North; which were named as “carpetbaggers'' by southerners who
opposed them. None of these improvements stopped white southerners from hating
Reconstruction just because it aimed to give blacks the same rights that whites had. Ku Klux
Klan
As a consequence of their determination, they started to organize terrorist groups to regain
their position. Their main purpose was to threaten and frighten black people and to prevent
them from claiming their rights. The largest and most feared one was a secret society known
as Ku Klux Klan. Their members dressed with white sheets and wore hoods to hide their faces.
They rode by night killing and beating any black who tried to improve their position through
the Southern country. Their sign was a burning wooden cross placed outside their intended
victims’ homes. The KKK used secrecy, intimidation, violence, and murder to prevent formerly
enslaved African-American men from voting. Black officeholders and their supporters were
especially targeted.
Segregation
Once blacks lost the vote because of the “Grandfather clauses”, taking away their other rights
became easy. All the southern states passed laws to enforce strict racial separation, or
“segregation”. Segregation was enforced on trains, in parks, in schools, in restaurants, in
theaters, and swimming pools - even in cemeteries!
Any black who dared to break these segregation laws was likely to end up either in prison or
dead. In the 90s an average of 150 blacks a year were killed illegally - “lynched” - by white
mobs. Unfortunately, tt seemed that the improvements the Civil War and Reconstruction had
brought to black people were lost forever.
However, Reconstruction hadn’t been for nothing. It had been the boldest attempt so far to
achieve racial justice in the U.S. The 14th amendment was especially important. It was the
foundation of the Civil Rights movement that made it possible for Martin Luther King to cry out
eventually on behalf of all black Americans.