Still Fighting: The Relationship Between Contemporary Preemption in the South and the Continued Struggle for Black Worker Rights

Post-Reconstruction Black Codes implemented throughout the South stunted the economic mobility of Black workers and replicated the free labor system of slavery (Nittle, 2021). While these laws were abandoned or outlawed over time (Nittle, 2021; PBS, 2017), the use of contemporary preemption in Southern states acts as a de facto continuation of Black Codes by barring legislation, often from progressive cities and municipalities, that seeks to strengthen rights and protections for Black workers throughout the region. In order to properly understand the unique racial, political, and economic entanglement between twenty-first century preemption and the oppression of Black workers, one must first explore the origins of preemption and the history of Black worker oppression in the South. This examination provides the backdrop for modern attempts to suppress Black workers in states like Alabama and Tennessee. A closer look at the deep political divisions between Southern legislatures and urban municipalities in their states offer arguments, though unfounded and insufficient, in favor of preemption, and outline the challenges worker advocates face when addressing the problem. Despite its challenges, it is critical for organizers to continue fighting preemption using creative strategies and to reaffirm the rights and advancement of Black workers.

The Origins of Incivility in Nursing: How Reconstruction-Era Policies and Organizations Impacted Social Behavior Within the Nursing Profession

Historians and scholars from varied disciplines acknowledge the existence of race-based discriminatory policies at the turn of the 20th century. However, little attention has been given to how the Freedmen's Bureau and Black Codes in post-Civil War Reconstruction shaped and impacted social behavior within the nursing profession. This article sheds light on the origins of incivility in nursing by taking a closer look at how early Reconstruction-era policies, structures of hierarchy in the U.S. armed forces, and its nursing corps and in the Red Cross, impacted the profession. The argument is made that the tandem workings of these policies and organizations, which produced racially insensitive and discriminatory practices, primed and erected systems of structural racism that perpetuated incivility within the nursing profession.

Introduction

The introduction uses Ruby McKnight Williams’s story after her arrival in California in the 1930s to present the themes and arguments of the book. Williams’s shock at the extent of segregation in her new home aligned with the experience of other black migrants and the introduction places her history in the context of black migration to the state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An overview of Jim Crow’s genesis during the era of statehood and the Gold Rush is followed by a discussion of African American resistance and the ways black bodies refused to follow the dictates of segregation. Organized resistance to black codes and antiblack practices put black Californians at the center of the state’s—and sometimes the nation’s—contestations over Jim Crow. An overview of the chapters is included.

Freedom Claims

This chapter examines the history of California’s commitment to Jim Crow, a history that begins during the state’s earliest years. African Americans loomed large in the minds of California’s earliest legislators and politicians. Black codes became a prominent feature of the state’s legal system and developed in tandem with scientific racism. Black bodies as a site of difference became a staple of the public discourse of citizenship. Resistance to the state’s color line took place at parades, in court, in schools, on streetcars, and on stage, all places African Americans were discouraged or prohibited from occupying. Gendered politics infused this first western campaign for civil rights and women’s participation would be pivotal in the ongoing struggle for racial justice.

Black Codes and Slave Codes

The institution of chattel slavery in the United States was primarily a system of labor and containment. One of the legal strategies that Euro-American enslavers devised to control the time, energy, and mobility of enslaved people of African descent was slave codes. Enslavers began to codify these restrictions into laws in the 17th century. One of the most (in)famous of these laws, partus sequitur ventrem, or “that is which brought forth follows the womb,” defined slavery as a heritable condition from the mother. Other codes, such as prohibitions against interracial marriage, followed. As chattel slavery became more entrenched into American society and economy in the 19th century, slave codes evolved as well. Southern legislatures required that an enslaved person carry a pass that authorized travel away from the plantation. Enslaved people could not own guns, could not learn to read or sing, beat drums, or gather in groups without their enslaver’s permission. Any violations of these codes meant swift and brutal punishment to transgressors. Despite these dehumanizing decrees, enslaved people resisted their bondage in overt and subtle ways. Even free blacks in the Northern states, however, did not escape these legal entrapments. Laws called “black codes” contained similar restrictions to the slave codes that existed in the Southern states. Some “free” regions, such as Ohio and Michigan, temporarily forbade free people of color from settling in their territories. With the end of the Civil War and the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, African Americans may have been nominally free, but state governments and local authorities in the Southern states invented ways to keep a de facto slavery system in place with the passage of black codes. Mississippi passed the first of these regulations in 1865. Vagrancy laws comprised a major component of black codes. Any unemployed African American was considered “idle” and could be charged with the “crime” of vagrancy and sentenced to a fine, jail, physical punishment, and/or forced labor. Other codes outlawed African American ownership of guns, serving on juries, and interracial relationships. In addition, Southern courts used black codes to enforce apprentice contracts that separated children from their parents. In historical scholarship, very few full-length monographs exclusively tackle the subjects of slave codes and black codes. Rather, coverage of these subjects is tied in with discussions of the experiences of enslaved life and resistance and black lives, labor, and activism during the Reconstruction period.

Repressive Legislation: Slave Codes, Northern Black Laws, and Southern Black Codes

Beginning in the 1630s, colonial assemblies in English America and later the new United States used legislation and constitutions to enslave Africans and deny free blacks civil rights, including free movement, freedom of marriage, freedom of occupation and, of course, citizenship and the vote. Across the next two centuries, blacks and a minority of whites critiqued the oppressive racialist system. Blacks employed varied tactics to challenge their enslavement, from running away to inciting revolts. Others used fiery rhetoric and printed tracts. In the 1760s, when whites began to search for political and philosophical arguments to challenge what they perceived as political oppression from London, they labeled their experience as “slavery.” The colonists also developed compelling arguments that gave some of them the insight that enslaving Africans was as wrong as what they called British oppression. The Massachusetts lawyer James Otis wiped the mirror clean in The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, stating “The colonists, black and white . . . are free-born British subjects . . . entitled to all the essential civil rights.” The Declaration of Independence polished the stained mirror by asserting, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” However, the Constitution of the United States negated these gains by offering federal protection for slavery; it was a covenant with death, as abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison later asserted. After the Revolution, many states passed black laws to deprive blacks of the same rights as whites. Blacks commonly could not vote, testify in court against a white, or serve on juries. States barred black children from public schools. The Civil War offered the promise of equality with whites, but when the war ended, many southern states immediately passed black codes to deny blacks the gains won in emancipation.

Legal Legacies of War and Reconstruction

The Civil War destroyed Mississippi’s slave system and its antebellum economy. From 1865 to 1890, lawmakers struggled to define the legal status and rights of newly-freed slaves and to build a new, more diversified economy. The era was marked by sharp legal shifts. Mississippi created one of the nation’s harshest postwar black codes (1866) but then followed a more liberal course during Reconstruction, enacting one of the nation’s first anti-segregation laws (1873). After Reconstruction, the state’s 1890 constitutional convention showed other Southern states how they could prevent blacks from voting while avoiding federal scrutiny. The shifting times were exemplified by Horatio Simrall, a legislator and judge who helped create the 1866 black code and 1890 anti-suffrage provisions but also upheld the 1873 anti-segregation law; and Isaiah Montgomery, who fought for black economic independence but, to the surprise of both races, supported the 1890 suffrage restrictions and urged his fellow blacks not to resist.