The mechanics of repression, both the ritualized and institutionalized subordination demanded of blacks, exacted a psychological and physical toll, shaping to an extraordinary degree day-to-day black life and demeanor. Perhaps the most difficult revelation to absorb was that color marked them as inferior in the eyes of whites, no matter how they behaved and whatever their social class. [1]
In the years after the Civil War the Southern states struggled to regain their footing both politically and economically. Politically, the old regimes of planter-dominated legislatures were eliminated. Economically, the former Confederate states were reduced to almost pauperism, their infrastructure destroyed, the plantation labor system they had depended on rendered obsolete.
While the Northern states pursued their version of Reconstruction, the South was focused on reinvigorating the plantation system and limiting the freedmen’s rights. To obtain these goals, the South began implementing what became known as the “Black Codes,” a series of laws that used political power to deny freedmen their rights.
Northern outrage and Congressional intervention soon ended the Black Codes, but the attempts to suppress the civil rights of blacks continued. Rare before the 1896 Plessey v Ferguson ruling, Jim Crow laws found their beginnings in the overthrow of Reconstruction in the 1870s.
