The New Black Codes
How the far-right is creating reactionary policies to eradicate racial justice efforts
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In 1822, a free Black man in Charleston, South Carolina named Denmark Vesey was said to have masterminded a plan to lead enslaved Black people in a rebellion.
Inspired by what he understood as a divine calling to resist slavery, Vesey spent months recruiting other Black people to his cause.
The plan was to raid the local arsenal and steal a cache of weapons. They rebels would fight their way onto the docks and commandeer a ship that they would then sail to Haiti, the first independent Black republic in the Western hemisphere.
The planned uprising never happened.
Two enslaved Black people revealed the plan to their white slaveholders. Local white men acted swiftly to round up all the alleged participants and leaders.
They made 131 arrests and sentenced 72 Black men to death including Denmark Vesey.
Thousands attended Vesey’s hanging which accompanied the execution of five other Black people that same day. They denied his friends and relatives the comfort of a proper burial, and they dismembered Vesey’s body instead.
That wasn’t the end of the cruelty.
The Repercussions of Rebellion
In an effort to intimidate the local Black community and prevent further slave rebellions, the white power structure enacted a series of new policies designed to limit Black freedom.
They burned down Vesey’s church, Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church (the same church that in 2015 a white supremacist entered and murdered nine Black people after a Bible study).
They no longer allowed enslaved Black people to hire out their time for pay. Free Black people could no longer hire enslaved Black people for jobs. The city hired 150 guards to patrol the city in an early iteration of a standing police force. They passed stricter measures to prevent enslaved people from reading or writing. One law even forbade free Black people from returning to the state if they ever left its borders.1
Punitive measures designed to instill fear and exert more control followed nearly every Black uprising for liberty.
After the Civil War, the conflict that ultimately led to the abolition of slavery, numerous states in the former Confederacy enacted laws meant to strip Black people of their freedom. These were called Black Codes.
Black Codes—laws and policies that curtail Black autonomy and rights—are not a relic of the past. The tradition continues in the present.
Court Blocks the Freedom Fund’s Grant Focused on Black Women Entrepreneurs
On September 30, a federal appeals court in Atlanta, Georgia issued a temporary block to a grant program specifically meant to provide capital funding to Black women-owned businesses.
The grant was administered by an organization called the Fearless Fund—a venture capital company that describes itself as bridging “the gap in venture capital funding for women of color founders building scalable, growth aggressive companies.”
The lawsuit that led to the block was filed by Edward Blum of the American Alliance for Equal Rights.
Blum is the same person behind the lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruling that declared race-conscious college admissions policies unlawful. The ruling struck a massive blow to affirmative action efforts to diversify college and university student bodies.
The New Black Codes
The attacks on affirmative action, and now a venture capital firm’s efforts to support women of color in business, represent an attempt to enact new Black Codes.
These punitive efforts aimed at Black communities and individuals are constant, but they gained renewed vigor after the 2020 racial justice uprisings.
The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd motivated millions to participate in demonstrations, protests, and calls for racial progress.
Months later, on January 6, 2021, far-right forces invaded the U.S. Capitol Building in an attempted insurrection.
Many educational efforts in schools, government, and corporations came under attack when far-right provocateurs twisted Critical Race Theory (CRT)—a legal framework designed to help explain how racist inequalities get embedded into laws—into an epithet hurled at any racial justice initiative.
The Advanced Placement African American Studies exam, the first of its kind offered by the College Board—faced stiff opposition in states such as Florida and Arkansas. Opponents of the program argued it “indoctrinated” students with harmful ideas about race and U.S. history.
The ruthless laws and policies implemented in the past several years demonstrate that the far-right does not merely want to oppose racial justice efforts, they want to obliterate them.
These days, the most meager attempts to promote racial equity can be met with a scorched-earth policy of total destruction.
For the far-right it is no longer sufficient to stand in the way of racial justice endeavors, they aim to dismantle the organizations and infrastructure that make these efforts possible in the first place.
They want to execute the reputations on the leaders, burn down the meeting places, and scatter the people so they can no longer plot freedom.
The far-right enacts laws and policies that may differ in letter but mirror in spirit the Black Codes of the 19th century.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to eliminate the new Black Codes. In the past, it took a Civil Rights movement and countless martyrs to the cause to bring about substantive change.
History also teaches us that as long as racism exists, there are always a people willing to gather for rebellion in pursuit of freedom.
What other examples of new Black Codes do you see happening now? Comment below.
Deborah Gray White, Mia Bay, Waldo E. Martin, Jr. Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. 2013, 2017, second edition). 185-186.
Banning student organizations based on racial or ethnic identity such as Black or Asian student associations on college campuses. Book bans on books relating to African American history or even showing diverse characters.
Forbidding diversity, equity, and inclusion seminars and training. Making advancement harder by adding more barriers.