Florida's Black Codes
Lawmakers wanted a legal framework—the black codes--for preserving white supremacy and maintaining free or cheap plantation labor regardless of the ban on slavery. These codes established in law the borders that blacks were not meant to cross.
Florida’s codes resembled its antebellum statutes regulating free blacks (Richardson 1969). Floridian planters believed that the codes were necessary to force blacks to work. In the public press and private correspondence, white Floridians across social class and educational level depicted blacks as biologically inferior and inclined towards criminality (Richardson 1969). Whites also feared black insurrection, as they had during slavery.
In his comments to the legislature that passed the black codes, a Florida Supreme Court justice stated:
Florida legislation was aimed at keeping blacks at work and in “performances” of subjugation that assigned blacks to particular spaces. By making vagrancy a criminal offense in which innocence was extremely difficult to defend, blacks in public space were at risk; one jurisdiction’s requirement that blacks give whites the “inside” of the sidewalk (Richardson 370) clearly demonstrated that blacks needed to “stay in place” both physically and symbolically.We have a duty to perform--the protection of our wives and children from threatened danger, and the prevention of scenes which may cost the extinction of an entire race. (Cited in Richardson 1969: 368)
The Republican Congress adopted two laws to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment over state interference, despite President Andrew Johnson’s veto. These were the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (bestowing full citizenship upon African Americans) and a new Freedmen’s Bureau Act. Nonetheless, Florida’s first postwar legislature was dominated by former slaveholders and ex-Confederates who—according to the assistant commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau in Florida—opposed equal or even “semi-equal” rights for blacks (Richardson 372). The legislature quoted from Dred Scott to prove that blacks were not citizens and recommended legislation denying blacks any political rights.
Florida lawmakers argued that these new laws preserved the “better” features of slavery (373). Blacks were prohibited from carrying any firearms (in defiance of the Constitution) and juries had to be all white even for black defendants. The act creating county criminal courts (a means to replace household tribunals that had once punished slaves) allowed the sale of those who could not pay a fine to anyone who would pay the fine and court costs. The law decreed special punishments exclusively for blacks, too, such as thirty-nine lashes, defended as necessary for a speedier return to work (instead of imprisonment) and too degrading for whites. Southern prisons and jails quickly became filled with blacks (Oshinsky 102).
The black codes also institutionalized racial difference and separation with fines or imprisonment for the cohabitation of white women and black men. They gave legal justification to the segregation of schools, public transportation and in religious and public meetings. Blacks received the death penalty for "inciting an insurrection," raping a white female (but not a black female), administering poison or burglary (Ortiz 2005; Richardson 374). Under the black codes, black men were taxed a dollar plus tuition fees to pay for black schools; the state did not pay anything for black schools (Fields 15-16). The codes were aimed at blocking mobility and access to information and knowledge, and limiting the possibilities for forming alliances with whites.