Critical Race Facts: Ten Historical Events Schools Rarely Teach

What They Don’t Want You to Know

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The Black Codes

Most people, Black or white, have at least heard of Jim Crow. Jim Crow legalized segregation and racism and is generally thought to have existed between 1877 and the mid-1960s and the Civil Rights movement. People don’t typically consider that the Civil War ended in 1865, and there was a twelve-year gap between the granting of freedom and the beginning of Jim Crow. Some can accurately place the Reconstruction era within that timeframe, knowing for a brief moment there were Black elected officials, including some statewide in Mississippi and South Carolina. What most people are unaware of is the Black Codes. They are rarely taught in schools and were an attempt by Southern states to duplicate slavery immediately after the Civil War.

The Black Codes were implemented state by state to do something about the newly freed enslaved people who, in some locations, outnumbered white people. In many cases, they sent Black people who ran …