The Crow Still Flies High: Modern Iterations of Black Codes in the United States

The Mississippi Black Codes of 1865 — the first such Reconstruction-era predecessors of Jim Crow — all but paved the road for Southern states eager to circumvent the Emancipation Proclamation passed just two years earlier. Black Codes like Mississippi’s served to control newly freed Blacks now unchained by the shackles of slavery. Though these laws are over a century behind us, their legacy lives on in modern political and social realities that continue to dehumanize and disenfranchise the same people our government…