of black labor. Similar to Decree 177 in Guatemala, the
Black Code of Alabama consisted of a vagrancy law and a
law against the “enticement” of laborers. It was designed to
impede labor mobility and reduce competition in the labor
market, and it ensured that southern planters would still
have a reliable low-cost labor pool.
Following the Civil War, the period called Reconstruction
lasted from 1865 until 1877. Northern politicians, with the
help of the Union Army, engineered some social changes
in the South. But a systematic backlash from the southern
elite in the guise of support for the so-called Redeemers,
seeking the South’s redemption, re-created the old system.
In the 1877 presidential election, Rutherford Hayes needed
southern support in the electoral college. This college, still
used today, was at the heart of the indirect election for
president created by the U.S. Constitution. Citizens’ votes
do not directly elect the president but instead elect electors
who then choose the president in the electoral college. In
exchange for their support in the electoral college, the
southerners demanded that Union soldiers be withdrawn
from the South and the region left to its own devices. Hayes
agreed. With southern support, Hayes became president
and pulled out the troops. The period after 1877 then
marked the real reemergence of the pre–Civil War planter
elite. The redemption of the South involved the introduction
of new poll taxes and literacy tests for voting, which
systematically disenfranchised blacks, and often also the
poor white population. These attempts succeeded and
created a one-party regime under the Democratic Party,
with much of the political power vested in the hands of the
planter elite.
The Jim Crow laws created separate, and predictably
inferior, schools. Alabama, for example, rewrote its
constitution in 1901 to achieve this. Shockingly, even today
Section 256 of Alabama’s constitution, though no longer
enforced, still states:
Duty of legislature to establish and maintain
public school system; apportionment of
public school fund; separate schools for white
and colored children.
The legislature shall establish, organize,