-
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.
