0:00:02.752,0:00:06.297
But even after African Americans begin [br]to be a part of the political process,

0:00:06.297,0:00:12.397
the state legislators of the south [br]passed more and more and more

0:00:12.397,0:00:15.294
restrictive measures which [br]were effectively designed

0:00:15.294,0:00:16.894
to criminalize Black life.

0:00:17.348,0:00:20.548
To make it impossible for any [br]African American man

0:00:20.548,0:00:25.070
who didn't live under the explicit[br]protection of some white landowner

0:00:25.070,0:00:29.910
to not be in violation of [br]some law at almost all times.

0:00:29.910,0:00:33.740
And the kinds of things we're talking[br]about are absurd to modern ears

0:00:33.740,0:00:40.299
but it was a crime in the south for a [br]farm worker to walk beside a railroad.

0:00:40.299,0:00:46.881
It was a crime in the south to speak[br]loudly in the company of white women.

0:00:46.881,0:00:52.382
It was a crime to sell the products [br]of your farm after dark

0:00:52.382,0:00:53.737
almost anywhere in the south.

0:00:54.403,0:00:58.363
There were reasons, there were sort of[br]odd logics behind almost all of these

0:00:58.363,0:01:01.309
almost all of these laws and[br]none of them said that they

0:01:01.309,0:01:04.897
applied excursively to African Americans[br]but overwhelmingly they were

0:01:04.897,0:01:07.479
only ever enforced against [br]African Americans because

0:01:07.479,0:01:14.169
the explicit intent, and when I say[br]the intent was explicit, it was.

0:01:14.169,0:01:18.545
In the constitutional convention [br]of Alabama in 1901 when

0:01:18.545,0:01:22.565
a new constitution was passed[br]which effectively ended all Black

0:01:22.565,0:01:25.793
participation in political life [br]and public life in Alabama,

0:01:25.793,0:01:31.016
the discussions around the drafting[br]of these laws were very open

0:01:31.016,0:01:34.568
about the intention of to make it[br]impossible for Black men

0:01:34.568,0:01:38.783
to participate in mainstream [br]America life in any meaningful way.

0:01:39.358,0:01:42.862
But the most powerful,[br]the most damaging

0:01:42.862,0:01:46.418
of all of these laws were [br]the vagrancy statutes

0:01:46.418,0:01:50.841
where in every southern state, [br]it became a crime, or you became

0:01:50.841,0:01:55.493
a criminal if you could not prove at any [br]given moment that you were employed.

0:01:55.493,0:01:59.295
What white southerners then discovered [br]was that this was also an extraordinarily

0:01:59.295,0:02:02.849
effective way of intimidating [br]African Americans away from

0:02:02.849,0:02:06.095
the new civil rights they'd obtained[br]as a result of the 13th amendment

0:02:06.095,0:02:08.370
and the end of the Civil War.

0:02:08.973,0:02:13.099
These laws passed to force them [br]back into labor also intimidated them

0:02:13.099,0:02:15.935
away from the political process[br]or could be used to intimidate them

0:02:15.935,0:02:17.275
away from the political process.

0:02:17.726,0:02:22.425
And so by the end of the 19th century,[br]on the basis of these two strategies

0:02:22.425,0:02:27.706
of white southerners, enormous populations[br]of African Americans had been returned to

0:02:27.706,0:02:32.167
a state of de facto slavery and [br]had been effectively pushed

0:02:32.167,0:02:36.253
completely, entirely out of the [br]political process and they

0:02:36.253,0:02:38.586
would not return for six decades.