But even after African Americans begin 
to be a part of the political process,

the state legislators of the south 
passed more and more and more

restrictive measures which 
were effectively designed

to criminalize Black life.

To make it impossible for any 
African American man

who didn't live under the explicit
protection of some white landowner

to not be in violation of 
some law at almost all times.

And the kinds of things we're talking
about are absurd to modern ears

but it was a crime in the south for a 
farm worker to walk beside a railroad.

It was a crime in the south to speak
loudly in the company of white women.

It was a crime to sell the products 
of your farm after dark

almost anywhere in the south.

There were reasons, there were sort of
odd logics behind almost all of these

almost all of these laws and
none of them said that they

applied excursively to African Americans
but overwhelmingly they were

only ever enforced against 
African Americans because

the explicit intent, and when I say
the intent was explicit, it was.

In the constitutional convention 
of Alabama in 1901 when

a new constitution was passed
which effectively ended all Black

participation in political life 
and public life in Alabama,

the discussions around the drafting
of these laws were very open

about the intention of to make it
impossible for Black men

to participate in mainstream 
America life in any meaningful way.

But the most powerful,
the most damaging

of all of these laws were 
the vagrancy statutes

where in every southern state, 
it became a crime, or you became

a criminal if you could not prove at any 
given moment that you were employed.

What white southerners then discovered 
was that this was also an extraordinarily

effective way of intimidating 
African Americans away from

the new civil rights they'd obtained
as a result of the 13th amendment

and the end of the Civil War.

These laws passed to force them 
back into labor also intimidated them

away from the political process
or could be used to intimidate them

away from the political process.

And so by the end of the 19th century,
on the basis of these two strategies

of white southerners, enormous populations
of African Americans had been returned to

a state of de facto slavery and 
had been effectively pushed

completely, entirely out of the 
political process and they

would not return for six decades.