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.