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.