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

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

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restrictive measures which 
were effectively designed

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to criminalize Black life.

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To make it impossible for any 
African American man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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almost anywhere in the south.

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

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

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applied excursively to African Americans
but overwhelmingly they were

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only ever enforced against 
African Americans because

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

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In the constitutional convention 
of Alabama in 1901 when

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a new constitution was passed
which effectively ended all Black

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participation in political life 
and public life in Alabama,

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the discussions around the drafting
of these laws were very open

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about the intention of to make it
impossible for Black men

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to participate in mainstream 
America life in any meaningful way.

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But the most powerful,
the most damaging

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of all of these laws were 
the vagrancy statutes

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

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

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

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effective way of intimidating 
African Americans away from

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

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and the end of the Civil War.

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

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

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away from the political process.

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

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

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a state of de facto slavery and 
had been effectively pushed

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completely, entirely out of the 
political process and they

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would not return for six decades.