![](https://pragmaticobotsunite2018.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/coffee.gif)
Welcome to the new week POU! After a nice break, its back to the grind.
https://twitter.com/JamesMWilliam18/status/1462841952911736836
The Black Codes, sometimes called Black Laws, were laws governing the conduct of African Americans (free and freed blacks). 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 colored 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.” 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. 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.
Even as former enslaved people fought to assert their independence and gain economic autonomy during the earliest years of Reconstruction, white landowners acted to control the labor force through a system similar to the one that had existed during slavery.
To that end, in late 1865, Mississippi and South Carolina enacted the first black codes. Mississippi’s law required Black people to have written evidence of employment for the coming year each January; if they left before the end of the contract, they would be forced to forfeit earlier wages and were subject to arrest.