Mississippi Enacts First Black Codes: Blueprint for Convict Leasing

Mississippi becomes the first Southern state to enact comprehensive Black Codes, creating a legal framework to re-enslave freed people through criminalization. The laws include draconian vagrancy statutes allowing arrest of any African American without a written labor contract, apprenticeship provisions forcibly binding Black children to white “employers” (usually former enslavers), and prohibitions on property ownership, carrying weapons, and assembly.

The vagrancy provisions deny jury trials and authorize sheriffs to “hire out” imprisoned African Americans to planters who pay the state rather than workers—effectively unpaid forced labor. As historian Khalil Muhammad notes, the Black Codes “criminalized every form of African American freedom and mobility” except working “for a white man on a white man’s terms.” These laws establish the legal foundation for convict leasing, which will become a multi-million dollar industry exploiting the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception allowing slavery “as punishment for crime.”

Within two years, Tennessee’s prison population shifts from 33 percent to 58 percent African American. By 1898, Alabama derives 73 percent of state revenue from leasing convicts at $9 per month to coal mines and plantations. The Black Codes create incentives for mass incarceration that echo in today’s prison-industrial complex, where the same constitutional loophole enables prison labor exploitation.