Mississippi Enacts Black Codes

Mississippi was the first former Confederate state to enact Black Codes after the Civil War. The laws prohibited Black people from renting or leasing land outside towns, required annual labor contracts with white employers, criminalized leaving employment before contract expiration, and created a 'vagrancy' statute under which unemployed Black people could be arrested and their labor sold to white employers. Children could be 'apprenticed' to former slaveholders without parental consent. The codes effectively reimposed forced labor under a legal veneer.