Black Code of Mississippi (1865)
Explanation and Analysis of the Document
The document consists of three parts: “An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for Other Purposes”; “An Act to Regulate the Relation of Master and Apprentice, as Relates to Freedmen, Free Negroes, and Mulattoes”; and “An Act to Amend the Vagrant Laws of the State.”
An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for Other Purposes
In this first section of the Black Code, African Americans are granted the right to buy and sell property other than real estate. By denying blacks the ability to own real property, the legislature attempts to ensure that they would remain dependent laborers. Indeed, Section 1 of the law permits blacks to rent property in cities and towns only if local government expressly allows them to. In this way, the legislature attempts to keep blacks in the country, close to agricultural labor, the only labor whites assume that blacks can perform.
Further attempts to control the labor of blacks appear in Sections 5...
