Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's even here too. So this is a real deal wing getting ding stuff you should know episode by goodness, By goodness, yeah, I'm trying to toss a bone to the churchy types that listened to us. Sure not take the Lord's name in vain for no good reason, by god, Wait a minute, sorry, I just messed it up. You undermined everything, and we have no way of getting rid of that, now, that's right, no edit function whatsoever. So uh, this was your pick the Black Codes, which I had heard the term before, but I did not know anything about. And as I was researching it, good pick, by the way, I think this is something that everybody should know about. UM. But as I was researching it, my my brain kept trying to like flesh it out further, flesh it out further, and like expand it. Um. And the Black Couds definitely touched a ton of other stuff. And you can make a lot of cases that they're still UM followed in some ways or at least mentally in America. UM. But they existed historically in such a narrow period of time that they basically came and went in about a year, which makes it astounding the impact that they had. You know. Yeah, and this is uh our buddy Dave Ruse and how stuff works. And uh, I got a lot of good information from the Constitutional Rights Foundation. Yeah, that's a robust website. Yeah, the Mississippi Encyclopedia. I can't forget that it's made out of bark, That's right. But you're talking about the Black Codes, and uh, you know, in short, I guess as a precursor definition, these were a series of laws that, like you said, weren't I mean, they kind of almost didn't even fully make it onto the books in some ways before they were taken off the books. But they were laws that Southern white people, notably and especially you know, plantation owners and and people that uh owned enslaved people came around and said, hey, you know what uh civil wars over and I know this emancipation proclamation has been around for a little bit where it hasn't quite gotten around everyone down here about that, and maybe we should just devise a series of laws that essentially re enslave these people. Uh. And you know, the only difference really will be that there will be some kind of wage involved. Yeah, yeah, that was it. They were trying to figure out how to read gain there agricultural society which had been built exclusively on the backs almost exclusively on the backs of enslaved people, free labor that you just had to pay to buy a person and then feed them and clothe them and house them. But like the labor was free, they had to figure out how to do that in the context of it being illegal to own people. Now, Yeah, they would to keep the status quo exactly, and that you know that it worth It's worth pointing out that the Northern corporations were fully on board with this plan because they didn't want any disruption to their supply chain of uh, you know, certainly cotton or anything that was built on the back of the labor of enslaved people that was being sent up north for manufacturing and stuff like that. So they didn't want any work disruptions either. Um, the Northern citizens it was a bit of a different story in many cases, and we'll get into all that, but maybe we should start with the end of the Civil War. Okay, let's April eighteen sixty five. Uh, Civil War ends. Like we said before, the Emancipation Proclamation had been on the books for a couple of years. But um, certainly white southern plantation owners were not doing their best to get the word out that everything was different now and that these people were now freed. Um. They they wanted to keep that as you know, quiet as possible, which was pretty easy to do back then. Yeah, because it was, Um there were things called slave codes, and one of the big slave codes is that it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write. So yeah, it was pretty easy to keep information out of the grape vine. Um, if you had a general population that that couldn't pick up a newspaper and read it, you know, that's right. Uh So Lincoln and I'd never realized Lincoln was shot so soon after the war ended. It's really never I don't think it. It hit me that it was just five days later. It makes you wonder what could have happened. But yeah, it was really surprising that it happened that quick too. Yeah, So five days later, Lincoln has gone Vice President Andrew Johnson takes over and he is tasked with leading the reunification of uh, these United States he was a Southerner, very important, and one of the first things he did was say, you know what, why don't I just appoint a bunch of military governors for now and uh to these Confederate states so we can get everything kind of organized and get everything set up. And so one thing about Johnson was that he and actually Lincoln before him, favored kind of a forgiving plan for re entry of southern states that had succeeded back into the Union. And there was like a real kind of a light touch. I think one of the big factors was a ten percent plane where only ten percent of the population had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Union again um. And that that was a that that put it out. The Johnson plan at odds with with Congress, right, Um, George. But one of the things that Johnson did take up was this idea of a Freedman's Bureau, which is basically this idea, Okay, the South is ruined, we wrecked it, but it was already really backwards to begin with, and we want to modernize it. One of the things we have to do to modernize it is to take this group of new citizens that were it lived before, but they weren't considered citizens, and now we have to figure out a way to, um to get them integrated into the society of the South, and we're gonna set up the Freedman's Bureau to do that. Yeah, we're talking like including women and children, like four million people. Yeah, so this is a lot of a lot of people to uh, I mean, I guess attempt to reintegrate into society. And the Freedman's Bureau did a few things. Um. They you know, they worked on wages to try and make sure that wages were fair. Uh. They tried to make sure that um, these men generally men could go find jobs if they wanted to and like choose who they wanted to work for. Uh. They had courts that they set up if you had a dispute with a wide employer, supposedly, these courts would be there to uh to at least hear your case. And while this is going on, the white Southerners were not so happy. They didn't like the Freedman's Bureau. They didn't like these new rules. They didn't like these military governors from the Union that were set up, even if temporary and they're temporarily and they were like, we gotta we gotta get this back under our control like quickly. Yeah, because the Freedman's Bureau was operated by the UM the military itself, so there was like no questioning this. It was an occupying force in the South basically saying this is how it's going to be, and we're here to make sure that that's how it goes down. Um and yeah, and the white Southerners were not happy about that at all. But part of Johnson's plan, remember I said it had kind of a light touch, and it was based on a lot more forgiveness than punishment, UM, was that once you hit that ten percent mark where your population has taken an oath to the Union again, you could um ratify a new state constitution basically start over. And by the way, we're just gonna let white people be involved in these new states. That's what Johnson's take was, that that's how it should be. And so that's kind of how he decreed, and that was kind of the beginning of reconstructions called the Presidential Reconstruction, and so some of the Southern states are all the Southern states said about in eighteen sixty five creating new state constitutions yeah, and they you know, they were starting to get it together again, so they could kind of take back the reins of control themselves. Uh. There was a provisional governor in South Carolina that literally said this is a white man's government. And they held elections by the end of that year, um, all over the South. And as you would expect a lot of times, he's a Confederate leaders, former Confederate Confederate leaders one positions of power, if not governorship, um, you know, congress people. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later. But they organized these state legislatures and uh, one of the things they did was said, all right, you know what, we need to really pull the South out of despairs to set up free schools, um, but for white people only. We're not gonna have black children in our schools, but we're gonna have free public education for everyone else. Yeah. So that was just right off the bat. The first time public education was introduced in the South, it was segregated, which set the stage for segregation throughout a lot of the twentieth century. The rest of the nineteenth century and there in a lot of the twentieth century, right, and you'll start to notice, like a lot of the stuff that the South dealt with and tried to saddle on its black citizenry finds it's its origins in the black codes that were were written in these state Southern or Southern State Conventions of eighteen sixty five. They just popped up everywhere. This is where it all began. Yeah, I mean, it's really pretty despicable, Like the idea that these people were finally freed by law and they said, well, here, you know, let's just make a bunch of laws then, like remember the good old colonial times when uh we had all these laws. Uh, let's just do that again, so we can remain in power, we can keep our status quo going. And sure, we might have to pay some wages. Now I tried to look and find what wages might have been. I'm sure it was, you know, a pittance, but that was kind of the only thing they would acquiesce to. Otherwise they wanted it to look and feel and smell exactly like uh it did during the enslaved period. Yeah, and they had to acquiesced to that because part of um, part of the requirements for returning to the Union as the state was to have abolition of slave and support abolition of slavery. And then also it was it was a there was a constitutional law now with the Thirteenth amend and said there's no more slavery in the United States. It doesn't matter where you are, you can't enslave anybody. So they had to do that. But it's like you said, they figured out every mental gymnastic they could make to recreate the slave economy in this new context of people being free and you're not being allowed to have slaves anymore. Right, I think that's a good setup. Okay, it feels like a break time, I think so. Yeah, yeah, it does kind of feel that way. Do you feel that way? I feel it. I definitely feel it. Wait, I'm not feeling so much like a break now. All right, Well, let's keep going them. No, no no, no, okay, I'm feeling like came back. Okay, it came back. All right, We're gonna take a quick break. I wonder if we did that for like ten minutes, like a Family Guy episode, if people would just turn it off. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of them have already. Anyway, all right, we'll be right back. Okay. So Christmas is approaching at the end of I guess what is that? And there were a couple of rumors floating around these different communities. One was in the black community. They were like, hey, I hear for Christmas, we're gonna get forty acres in a mule for every family on Christmas Day. And so let's not sign any work contracts or anything. Let's see what kind of happens here. We may be able to have our own farms and to work for ourselves and to be enterprising, uh families on our own. And the other rumor that was going around was in the white community in the South, which was, hey, they all think that they're going to get forty acres in the mule. This is not gonna happen. They may be giving out a little bit of land here and there, but this is definitely not happening. And when this goes down in Christmas Day, there's gonna be a huge rebellion and it's going to be a big problem for us. And I was looking into that forty acres in a mule thing. Apparently it all came out of um William two Comps sherman Field Order number fifteen, where he basically said everything from Jacksonville to Charleston. Thirty miles inland is going to be set aside for newly freed slaves to basically own and live and work. And it was just meant to be this little area. It never was fulfilled. But somehow that got turned into among the black community in the South forty acres in a mule, which I had never heard before. Like, I just thought the government had always promised everybody forty acres in a mule. Yeah. I wasn't sure about the origins of that, and I knew that they were going to reappropriate some land, but um, yeah, I never knew that it was not an earnest sort of offer. Well. They also it was based on the idea that the North had confiscated tons of land from the Confederacy, and so they did think that they were going to redistribute it to newly freed black Americans. But apparently part of the Johnson plan was to give that land back to the original owners, and so that's how it got scuttled. That's right. So all this stuff is going on, there's a lot of people scared on both sides. There's a lot of fear, uh, And this is kind of the background that's set up these Black codes UM mainly in Mississippi and South Carolina. So I saw there were there were black codes in other states. I know Texas had one, I believe North Carolina had one. I think a lot of the Southern states. If they didn't actually enact them, then they were they had they had written them or drafted them, or trying to at least. But I think South Carolina and Mississippi's were maybe the most tanous of all of them. Yeah, I mean sure, that was my thing. Mississippi's was supposed to be even worked in South Carolina. Yeah, that was what I saw as well. Mississippi seems to be to have been the worst of the worst. But these codes fell into a um sort of a group of four or five different ways that they could restrict someone's rights through law, uh with with technically skirting the abolition amendments. And basically what they did is they figured out that if you wanted black people to work, because there was this idea that among Southerners, among white Southerners, I should say, that black people wouldn't work on their own. They had to be forced in to work through like slavery, or they had to be forced into work by some other new law, but if left to their own devices, they just wouldn't work and the economy would fall. So that was the idea at least. I don't know if that was a pretext for just some deeply racist off or that was deeply racist, But if it was really just that was the kind of idea that was supporting like the moneyed class, and that idea trickled down into white society in the South. I'm not sure, but that was kind of like the premise that they were going on when they were writing these plaque codes, trying to figure out how to force black people into work agreements that benefited the white people they were working for. Yeah, and it's even a little more despicable than you might think because they they also dressed it up with a few basic rights that you know, you see, you read stories, and you don't know how widespread it was. But even some of these basic rights I think many times weren't um enacted. Uh, they may have been on the books or at least offered on the books, but in order to um be a person of color back then, and to say like, hey, wait a minute, it says here that I can sue somebody, and I can acquire my own property and I can you know, enjoy the fruits of my own labor um. They have to be able to, you know, hire out an attorney and get it in front of a judge, and all these things were, you know, next to impossible basically, So even if they did dress it up a little bit with some basic rights, it was it was these weren't rights that were being enshrined, you know, right, or even if they were, it's like, oh wow, thanks a lot for the most some of the most basic human rights that should be afforded to anybody, like recognizing our marriages as legitimate. Apparently, in the Annabellum South, black people were viewed as so subhuman that there they couldn't possibly marry one another in any kind of context that white people saw marriage and their children were all by definition than illegitimate. Well, in the super progressive post Civil War South, now their marriages were recognized as legal and their children were recognized as legitimate. How far have we come? Basically, the white Southerners were saying to themselves, as long as you married another black person, by the way, that was the other thing too, you said, you can sue um, you you all all that kind of stuff. You could sue another black person, You still could not sue a white person. You couldn't, um have anything to do with the arrest of white person. The best you could hope for is to go down to a judge and fill out a complaint against a white person. Conversely, chuck, at least I believe in it might have been South Carolina or Mississippi. You, Um, if you were a white person, you could you could arrest any black person you wanted for even a misdemeanor, like any white person could arrest any black person. But a black person could only fill out a complaint against a white person in front of a judge right where it went into the circular file. Yeah. And you probably were risking your health, well being, and possibly life by filing a complaint or filling out a complaint against a white person as a black person in the in the post Civil War South, you know, yeah, absolutely another and you know, we'll talk about other civil rights that were violated along the way, or at least limited. Um. But another big way these black codes uh helped restrict you know, their freedoms ultimately was through something through these labor contracts. Uh. They basically said in South Carolina that if you want to work, then you will work as a servant. Um, we're not going to call you a slave anymore. You'll be a servant. Uh. And we're still gonna be called masters. And you have to sign this contract and uh, we will pay you a wage. It will all be in writing, has to be approved, but in witnessed by a judge. But here's the deal. You have to live in our property. You have to stay quiet, you can't get in the way. You have to work from sunrise to sunset except on Sunday. You can't leave, you can't go anywhere, you can't have visitors. And basically everyone looked around and said, well, what's the difference this small wage that we're being paid, and they said yes. Basically they're like, yeah, that's everything. That's the whole thing right there. And I also saw chuck in one place that the wages that were paid to these dow black servants who were formerly slaves were basically what the white plantation owners have been spending to feed and clothe and house their slaves. So for them, there was basically no no change in net gain or net output. It was just now they were directing that toward them, the black workers as wages instead. That's it. That was the only difference. And then wonder if they charged them rent. I don't know. I saw that in some cases they did have to house people who stayed on their land, but I think that they did, and they were allowed to charge them rent. They were also allowed to deduct from their wages for like time, um like all like, yes, there were I get the impression that there was a lot of ways that you could take back a lot of those wages that you paid somebody. One of the other ways that you could take back that money is through your local town store, which would um, which set up a system of what's called debt peonage, which is kind of like you know, the whole company store set up that miners in the North got into and like the early nineteen hundreds, you your little fifteen tons of cold, but you can't go to heaven because you know, your soul of the company store. Kind of thing that found its root in the South in around eighteen sixty five, where if you were in this labor contract, you could go to local store and offer half of your crops as like UM capital and then start borrowing. And so all of a sudden, people who had been enslave before and could have nothing now had free credit at the local store. And when the when the credit was called in at the end of the season, when they harvested their crops, they frequently found not only were all their crops taken, but like all the stuff they had bought was being called back in and was taken to to cover their debts, like because of huge crazy interest rates involved. So they were trapped in this cycle where once they entered and they had to chuck you said it yourself. They had to engage in these labor contracts. Once they entered them, they did not get back out, and all of the advantage was towards the white the white plantation owners and the white store owners. They're also allowed to whip anyone under eighteen, any servants under eighteen, and if it was someone over eighteen, you could get a judge's permission basically to whip somebody. Um if they you know, if it got just so bad that they said, you know, I can't even I can't do this, I'm quitting this job, I'm breaking this contract. Then they were basically like all right, well, you're not gonna get paid anything. Then they could uh take back their wages and they were essentially forfeited, and they could be arrested, and the judge could say, no, you're going rap back to where you came from because, uh, you broke a contract, and it's it's just risk end as you know, an enslaved person escaping and being returned to their master. Right, So you would say, okay, well how about you just don't work? Like there's your answer right there. They could just say I'm not gonna work. Maybe I'll just hang around and try, uh try my luck. Just hanging out like it would make a lot more sense than ending up in debt and having to work for you know, my former plantation owner. And that they had that figured out too as part of the black Coats chuck. If you were uh caught without a labor contract, you could be arrested unemployed from did not have a job. That's exactly right. So they, yes, they figured out how to force black people into work by saying it's illegal for you to not have a job. And the big horrible irony of the whole thing is if you were arrested for what they called vagrancy. You would go to jail. They would say, you owe us this huge exorbitant debt. Is there any white plantation owner who would like to come pay this debt? A plantation order would come along, pay the debt and say you now belong to me because your debt was just transferred to me, and I'm going to put you to work until you pay off this high exorbitant debt. And you're going to be stuck in that same cycle as you would have been if you just engaged in the labor contract to begin with and not been arrested for vagrancy. Right, or they could say, well, actually, your honor, I I learned quite a bit about carpentry or or smith ing. I'm a great smithy. Didn't we learn that what they were not called smithy z they have to be though forever it's just too great a word, you know. Like I'm a cobbler, Like I really have a lot of talent, so I'd like to open up my own shop. And I think I can do this. I have a lot of driving initiative. And the judge would say no, no no, no, I'm sorry, I don't think you understand you have to work if you want to work, you have to sign a work contract and work for a white person. You can't open up your own business, and or you're a vagrant. And then they would say, well, what about those white guys over there, they don't have jobs, And they said, well, but they're allowed to sign oaths of poverty to get out of jail, so well, can we do that? No, you can't do that. So it's essentially just two separate systems set up from the beginning with these black codes, two separate groups of laws depending on your skin color and chuck. One of the other UM owners parts about this is they're like, oh, if you're a minor, you don't escape this either. Like there's something now called apprenticeships, which is basically like vagrancy laws for kids and um you can be put to work as an apprentice and you don't even have to be paid. If you're under eighteen for a woman or under twenty one for a man, you can be apprenticed out to somebody. An apprentice can be like, you're still a field worker. It doesn't mean you're actually learning a trade, although some places did specify they did have to have to be taught a trade and fed and clothed, and for all intents and purposes, you were an enslaved person just as much as you were before because you weren't being paid for the labor you were now being forced to do well. And they could I think they could even take the kids and just say, I'm sorry you your parents are negligent, and so we're gonna take you in and a print it and put you in our apprenticeship. I don't know. I think they probably even call it a program that gives it a little too much value. But they said, you know, sorry, your parents are negligent. We can take you. Uh, you have to work for me if you're a young man until you're twenty one, or if you're a young woman until you're eighteen. And um, that's the you know it's there's a man called what was this? I know his last name was Blackman. He wrote a book called Slavery by another name that had a lot to do with this, And there was one story in here about a gentleman named green Cottenham. This is a nineteen o eight, mind you, this is way way way later. He was arrested for vagrancy in Alabama in nineteen o eight, auctioned off to us deal where they chained him to Uh, they chained him up, put him in a coal mine in Birmingham and said, all right, this is your new life. Uh, you have to do this until you're fine. Is repaid. Um if he you know, if he collapsed, he was whipped. If he died, he would be buried in a pauper's grave with everyone else. And I think out of the thousand black men who are working for U. S. Steel in less than one year, sixty of them died from homicide, accidents or disease. So this was a yeah, the North's hands aren't clean about this, and and that was something that like you know, the North frequently gets gets a pass on on that um, especially among just kind of like the white view of history that it was all the South's fault that reconstruction failed, um, that the South was um unwilling to kind of progress forward and accept black people into society. That was definitely true, but they were aided in some ways by the North, and the North definitely was engaged in some of these unsavory practices as well. I think that's definitely worth pointing out. So we talked a little bit about different laws depending on your skin color. Uh. This wasn't just like a subjective opinion, like they literally did this with their courts. Uh. They did have um certain new technically certain new freedoms for court. Like we talked about suing someone but could only be another person of color. Uh, you could be a plantiff for a defendant, but only in cases. Uh. Well, I guess a plaintiff only in cases where there was another person of color involved. And the penalties were way different. I mean a lot of the times you get the death penalty if you were black, you would for the literally the same crime, you would not get that penalty if you were white. And even minor offenses, like the smallest things you could imagine that you would be brought in for Um, you would to be hired out and worked, uh you know, twelve fourteen hours a day, or you were whipped right. And so the idea was that they were making it basically illegal to be black, um. And they made it illegal to be unemployed. And they set up a system so that everybody, all black people, newly freed black people in the South were funneled into this economic system that favored white people and tried to recreate slavery as best as possible, right, And one of the ways that they got away with this, one of the ways around this that was um that really kind of brought jail into the forefront of this initiative to recreate the slave economy in the South, was actually found and is still found in the thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution. That the amendment that abolished slavery. It said, you can't enslave anybody anywhere in the United States, except unless as a punishment for a crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. There is a loophole in the Amendment to the Constitution that abolishes slavery and says that if you've been convicted of a crime, you can be used as a slave as punishment for that crime. And that really got the attention of the Southern legislatures after the Civil War, and they said, okay, all right, well, then how about we just start arresting black people on mass And that's what drove that whole illegalization of being black in the South. Uh, that was written into the Black cones. Yeah, it was, you know, that's why they did the vagrancy laws, that's why they did the apprenticeship laws. It all was just sitting there in front of their face with this massive loophole, and it was still allowed to happen, um well to a to a certain degree, which we'll get to in a sec. Well, there's one good example. Let's give him the example of the pig laws real quick. Yeah, pig laws were uh, certainly in other places, but definitely in Mississippi. I found where they they basically tried to make any crime that it might be more likely that a black person might commit way way more prosecutable, um like grand larceny went from twenty five dollars to like ten dollars. And the big one, which is why they call them pig laws, was any farm animal that was stolen. And these could you know a farm animal could have a value of like a dollar or less. Uh, They said, that is also grand larceny because they knew that, uh, you know, formally, en slave person might be more likely to steal the chicken for dinner so they could eat and survive, and make that a literal grand larceny offense. Right like grand larceny published punishable by five years in jail, during which time you could be leased out by the state to work for peanuts on a plantation. Um for a white business owner. That was the setup. The sad thing is is a lot of people today, a lot of social and his storical critics say, yeah, it's still going on. That loophole is still there, and there's still a lot of slave labor being used. And even if you're not being if you're not not being paid for that labor, you're being paid so little, um that you might as well be a slave. I think there was the most recent sentences. It was in two thousand five, the most recent prison labor sensors. They found one point five million prisoners were working, six thousand of which we're working in the manufacturing center. Most of them were making two dollars or less a day if they were being paid at all. Geez and Chuck, um, I know, you know, there's awesome documentary on Netflix about the thirteenth Amendment and the implications it has. Just it's called and it is a It's one of those documentaries it's like life changing after you watch it. It's I encourage everybody to go watch that documentary. It's just that good. Right. Should we take a break, Yes, all right, we'll be right back. So Chuck after the Civil War rands the Union says, Okay, Southern States, come back, come back, go right, your your your new state constitutions, show them to us, and let's see what you got. And the Southern states went off in eighteen sixty five and held their all white conventions and wrote their new all white laws. Actually they're all black laws, I should say. And they came back to the Congress of the United States and said, okay, first, let us just explain before you make any judgments. And and uh, the Congress was not at all amused by this. It was not very surprising. But there was a huge um swath of Congress called the Radical Republicans, who were they wanted the South punished. They were deeply offended that the South had taken up arms against the nation. Um. They hated slavery, they thought it was disgusting. They thought the South was backwards and it needed to be modernized. And they were not in any kind of particular mood for allowing concessions for racist slave owners trying to recreate the slave economy. And it it brought Congress crashing down upon the South in the form of reconstruction. Yeah, I mean, they basically said you know what, We're not gonna seat anyone you elect to Congress. Uh, we are not going to we're gonna invalidate any of these laws that you're putting on the books. And some of the Southern states said uh to themselves, like, oh, like, I think I see the writing on the wall. This is really bad. And if we want to have any kind of agency of self rule, we might need to walk back some of these black codes a little bit because it's clear that they're not um, they're not hip to what we're trying to do here at all. Right, they saw through it. I don't know how, but they saw through our motives and so we're just trying to recreate slavery. So even though they had Johnson in office, they were like, we have one of our own as president. Um, he was vetoed by Congress, and it was essentially kind of a hostile Congress towards Johnson and the South. Yeah, Johnson was the first president to be impeached, and he was saved from conviction in the Senate by just one vote. And it wasn't over him being a racist, but he definitely was a racist. He even said he vetoed the civil rights Act of eighteen sixty six, which basically said black people are citizens now, and this is what they deserve, just like any other citizen. And Johnson said, well, whoa, whoa, We've never done anything even remotely like this for white citizens, why should we do it for black citizens? And like his veto even was syst um, and he and basically everybody who wasn't on board with the Radical Republicans viewpoint missed the idea that the newly freed, formerly enslaved black citizens that were now citizens of the United States needed a leg up to get on some sort of equal footing with white people to be integrated in society. That it would be a good idea for everybody to be on fairly equal footing so that society could move forward faster. And to do that the people who in the economy, yes, exactly, and to do that, the people who used to be slaves needed a little bit of a leg up because they've been kind of held back for four hundred years at that point, or a couple hundred years at that point. Um. So that was kind of the premise that the Radical Republicans were basing all this on, and all of the Conservatives were saying no, this is this is too much, it's too fast, it's too radical, Um, this is this is a problem now, And the the Southern States started to kind of get the sympathy of some Northern conservatives. Yeah, I mean they it's not like they were talked into racist attitudes, but they were kind of talked into like, Hey, you know what's gonna happen if these freedmen start holding office and they start getting in positions of power, is you know, they're people don't want to work, so they're gonna get laws passed that basically see to the fact that they don't have to work and they can just live off of us, and we don't want them to get in Like I think in eighteen sixty seven, a couple of years after the initial proposition proposition of these black codes is the first time that these uh freedmen actually participated and voted in elections. And these white Southerners essentially kind of put the fear of God into these Northerners, saying, you see what's coming, right, and they kind of fell for it. They did fall for it. There's a really excellent article that I would dig everybody go read on Jacobin Um uh dot com. It's called Killing Reconstruction by Heather Cox Richardson, and she basically lays out how the South said, Okay, all of our racist views are following on deaf ears up north. They don't really like the racism thing. What else could we do? And somebody said, what about classism? And they said, oh yeah, there's a lot of rich people up in the North. They're gonna love our classist argument. And so what they said is exactly what you were saying. That if you let these people who haven't haven't ever earned anything in their life get elected to office, they're gonna get ahold of all this taxpayer money and they're gonna redistribute wealth. They're gonna take hard earned white wealth and redistribute it to lazy, shiftless former black slaves. And do you really want that? And by the way, it has nothing to do with being black. If you let any worker do that, if you let any worker vote, any worker get into office, they're going to redistribute wealth. And even today, uh, Heather Cox richards And make a really great connection to today where if you if we talk about an activist government, a government that says we're here to really help raise the well being of everybody. People say activist government and they want to redistribute wealth, and it's probably either run by or being run for the benefit of people of color. That's still that whole idea still goes on today, and it finds its roots in the post Civil War reconstruction South, where the Southerners finally got the ear and the sympathies of the Northerners by shifting the focus from racism to classism. Well, they they scared them financially, there is going to hit your pocketbook, and that really pricked up their ears at that point. It did, and so people say, well, you know, reconstruction was abandoned, and that's exactly right. It was an astounding project. From eighteen seventy three different constitutional amendments were introduced, past and ratified that ended slavery, that A created due process of law, and that UM gave black men the right to vote. Within five years, there was like it was very promising. Black people were running and being elected to Southern UM, Southern town councils, state legislators, judge ships, like things were happening. But then when the North kind of lost interest or lost its initiative to keep going. It just fell apart, and the North definitely turned its back on black Southern Americans and left them out high and dry and opened the door for Jim crow Loss. Yeah, I feel like this guy's I mean, I'm from the South, but you lived here quite a while. Like I feel like we're always saying, hey, listen, it was a problem all over the place everybody, And it's true, but this is I don't know, it's hard to sort of break the I mean, the stereotype is there for a reason in the South obviously, but definitely I think there were just so many comes as it um corporations and and rich white Northerners that uh, you know, we need to bring that up. Well, the KKK sucked a lot of the oxygen down towards the South as far as blame goes, because they definitely did engage in a terror campaign to like get black people out of politics and out of like the idea that they should be participating in society. And then even when black people went ahead and did it and the KKK wasn't around, just northern normal white townspeople would riot and like kill like black office holders and to keep the status quo going. So I mean like it was. It was when the North left it. They just completely left black Southerners out to dry, like in one of the biggest betrayals. It's it's ever taken place in the history of this country. Yeah, I mean there, it definitely. I know that that nimby is sort of a modern internet phrase. Have you heard of that? No, not in my backyard. Oh yeah, yeah, I've heard that. I've never heard the acronym there. Yeah. Now, I mean, you know how it is these days, everything is just shortened, so now you just say nimby on social media. But there's a lot of nimbi nimbiness going on back then for sure. For sure, and the idea that oh it's not because they're black, it's because they're poor workers. We can't give poorer workers rights. That it made it a lot more palatable for northerns to kind of take part and feel okay about themselves with that. That's right. So again we just want to say what we were talking about, these black codes and the two types of reconstruction. We're talking about like a one to fifteen year period in American history, but it's one of the periods that has some of the farthest reaching repercussions that are still around today. Um, and it's just astounding to me like that that it went from slave codes to black codes to Jim Crow laws and then finally the Civil Rights era got America to say on paper, we're not racist any longer, which is where a lot of people end it. But those are the same people that point to the Civil Rights are and say, see, America is not racist anymore, which is probably the gas lighting is gas lighting you could possibly experience in America today if you ask me, that's right. And hey, if we're recommending documentaries along these lines, I'm gonna recommend the HBO four part documentary Exterminate All the Roots. Have you seen that one? No, it's great, it's uh. It's made and narrated by Raoul Peck, and it is a four part series that basically draws the line from the very beginning, like the very first uh efforts at colonization and gen and genocide by the Spanish, you know, however, many hundreds of years ago that was, and they draw he's he he basically kind of covers colonization in genocide over the years throughout history. But the way he draws direct straight lines from then to now and what we're looking at now in America and all over the world is really impactful. It's hard to describe how like some of it is uh, straight up documentary. Some of it is recreations, but like really really good historical recreations while he's narrating, and he just uses amazing graphics to illustrate to really hit home a lot of stuff. It's I mean, it's like going to school. It is super dense and and hetty, but I really, if you got four hours to kill exterminate all the brutes is great. Yeah. That's what kept coming up for me when we were researching Black codes. I was like, oh, that's still going on today. Oh that's still how a lot of white people think about black people today. Um, It's just it's nuts, Like, how how much of a society, our society is still just kind of predicated on these these terrible impressions. You know that we're created and per perpetuated by the Southern planting planner class. Yeah, and that's why it's super frustrating when anyone ever says like, oh, this is an eric everyone just has an equal shot in this country. I don't want to hear anything else. Yeah, I just I can't even you know, it's hard to even head of a discussion with someone who says something like that, I know what you mean. Jim Crow was not that long ago. No, it wasn't. We'll keep chipping away at it, huh yeah, and we'll we'll, I mean, Jim Crow has sort of been something we wanted to cover for a long time. Um, okay, Well, in the meantime, if you want to know more about Black Codes, there's a lot of ink that's been written about it, and it is all really good and interesting and eye opening, and you should probably spend a little more time researching it. And since I said that it's time for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this just a letter of thanks from one of our oldest, uh you know, most long time listeners. I think Ian Clarkson has been listening for a while. Enjoyed Into the World, was a movie crusher when that was around, And uh, this is from Ian and Ian legit freaked out that I'm reading this so good it always makes me happy for sure. Howdy from Dallas, guys. I wanted to reach out and just begin by saying thank you, for all the joyful content you provide the world during the gloomy time of covid UH and adolescence, I really needed a boost that y'all provided. I've listened since I was seventeen. Now I'm twenty five, and abe Stuff you Should Know is my classroom long since I've exited school. Josh drove me to get my archaeology minor, and Chuck is uh. I know how about that? And Chuck has given me and my family endless amounts of movies and nights of joy. We outsourced a lot of our movie picking to Chuck. Actually, all of you are wonderful humans, and I just wanted to reach out and express my pure joy that I received from Stuff you Should Know. I can't I think all enough for being so insightful and kind with what you create. Hope to one day be able to share your catalog with my kids. I've written in once before when I was in high school too, but I thought i'd reach out again. Both of you remind my parents of Click and clack. We've gotten that from a bunch of people. That's the highest praise you can get anyway. Hope, Hope pull as well. This if you should know podcast Office and that you're all enjoying you're descent into the holidays. Your loyal fan, Ian Clarkson. Ian is a great dude. That was a fantastic email. Ian, thanks a lot for that and hello from us. That's right, Hardy. Hello, that's right. Uh. If you want to get in touch with us like Ian did, you can send us an email to wrap it up spending on the bottom and send it off to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.