Stuff You Should Know - What were the black codes?

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

The black codes were proposed laws that basically tried to keep a form of slavery alive and well after the end of the Civil War. It didn't last long but the shadow of those codes still exist today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's even here too, so this is a real deal, winga ding ding, Stuff You Should Know episode, bye goodness.

Bye goodness. Yeah, I'm trying to toss a bone to the churchy types that listen to us. Sure. Not take the Lord's name in vain for no good reason. Bye God. Oh, wait a minute, sorry. Chuck. I just messed it up. You, you undermined everything and we have no way of getting rid of that now. That's right, no edit function whatsoever. So this was your pick, the black codes, which I had heard the term before, but I did not know anything about. And as I was researching it, good pick by the way, I think this is something that

everybody should know about. But as I was researching it, my brain kept trying to like flesh it out further, flesh it out further and like expand it. And the black codes definitely touch a ton of other stuff and you can make a lot of cases that they're still followed in some ways or at least mentally in America. But they existed historically in such a narrow period of time that they basically came and went in about a year, which makes it astounding the impact that they had, you know? Yeah. And this is our buddy Dave Ruse and how stuff works. And I got a lot of good information from the Constitutional Rights Foundation. That's a robust website as it turns out.

Yeah. The Mississippi Encyclopedia. Can't forget that. It's made out of bark. That's right. But you're talking about the black codes in short, I guess, as a precursor definition. These were a series of laws that, like you said, weren't, I mean, they kind of almost didn't even fully make it onto the books in some ways before they were taken off the books. But they were laws that Southern white people, notably, and especially plantation owners and people that owned enslaved people came around and said, hey, you know what? Civil war's over. And I know this Emancipation Proclamation has been around for a little bit where it hasn't quite gotten around to everyone down here about that.

And maybe we should just devise a series of laws that essentially re-enslave these people. And, you know, the only difference really will be that there will be some kind of wage involved. Yeah. Yeah, that was it. They were trying to figure out how to regain their agricultural society, which had been built exclusively on the backs, almost exclusively on the backs of enslaved people, free labor that you just had to pay to buy a person and then feed them and clothe them and house them. But, like, the labor was free. They had to figure out how to do that in the context of it being illegal to own people now. Yeah. They want to keep the status quo. Exactly. And, you know, it's worth pointing out that the Northern corporations were fully

on board with this plan because they didn't want any disruption to their supply chain of, you know, certainly cotton or anything that was built on the back of the labor of enslaved people that was being sent up north for manufacturing and stuff like that. Right. So they didn't want any work disruptions either. The Northern citizens, it was a bit of a different story in many cases. And we'll get into all that. But maybe we should start with the end of the Civil War. Okay. Let's... April 1865. Civil War ends. Like we said before, the Emancipation Proclamation had been on the books for a couple of years. But certainly white Southern plantation owners were not doing their best to get the word out that everything was different now. Right. And that

these people were now freed. They wanted to keep that as, you know, quiet as possible, which was pretty easy to do back then. Yeah. Because it was, there were things called slave codes. And one of the big slave codes was that it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write. So, yeah, it was pretty easy to keep information out of the grapevine. If you had a general population that couldn't pick up a newspaper and read it, you know? That's right. So Lincoln, and I never realized Lincoln was shot so soon after the war ended. Yeah. It's really... I don't think it hit me that it was just five days later. It makes you wonder what could have happened. But yeah, it was really surprising that it happened that quick too. Yeah. So five days later, Lincoln

is gone. Vice President Andrew Johnson takes over and he is tasked with leading the reunification of these United States. He was a Southerner, very important. And one of the first things he did was say, you know what? Why don't I just appoint a bunch of military governors for now and to these Confederate States so we can get everything kind of organized and get everything set up? And so one thing about Johnson was that he and actually Lincoln before him favored kind of a forgiving plan for reentry of southern states that had seceded back into the Union. And there was like a real kind of a light touch. I think one of the big factors was a 10% plan where only 10% of the population had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Union again.

And that put it at the Johnson plan at odds with Congress, right? Sure. But one of the things that Johnson did take up was this idea of a Freedman's Bureau, which is basically this idea, okay, the South is ruined. We wrecked it, but it was already really backwards to begin with and we want to modernize it. One of the things we have to do to modernize it is to take this group of new citizens that lived before, but they weren't considered citizens. And now we have to figure out a way to get them integrated into the society of the South. And we're going to set up the Freedman's Bureau to do that. Yeah, we're talking like, including women and children, like four million people. So this is a lot of people to, I mean, I guess, attempt to reintegrate into society. And

the Freedman's Bureau did a few things. They worked on wages to try and make sure that wages were fair. They tried to make sure that these men, generally men, could go find jobs if they wanted to and choose who they wanted to work for. They had courts that they set up. If you had a dispute with a white employer, supposedly these courts would be there to at least hear your case. And while this was going on, the white Southerners were not so happy. They didn't like the Freedman's Bureau. They didn't like these new rules. They didn't like these military governors from the union that were set up, even if temporarily. And they were like, we got to get this back under our control quickly. Yeah, because the Freedman's Bureau was operated by the military itself.

So there was like no questioning this. It was an occupying force in the South basically saying, this is how it's going to be. And we're here to make sure that that's how it goes down. And yeah, and the white Southerners were not happy about that at all. But part of Johnson's plan, remember, I said it had kind of a light touch and it was based on a lot more forgiveness than punishment was that once you hit that 10% mark where your population's taken a note to the union again, you could ratify a new state constitution, basically start over. And by the way, we're just going to let white people be involved in these new states. That's what Johnson's take was, that that's how it should be. And so that's kind of how he decreed. And that was kind of the beginning

of Reconstruction. It's called the Presidential Reconstruction. And so some of the Southern States or all the Southern States set about in 1865, creating new state constitutions. Yeah. And they, you know, they were starting to get it together again, so they could kind of take back the reins of control themselves. There was a provisional governor in South Carolina that literally said, this is a white man's government. And they held elections by the end of that year, all over the South. And as you would expect, a lot of times these Confederate leaders, former Confederate leaders won positions of power, if not governorship, you know, Congress people, and we'll talk about that a little bit more later.

But they organized these state legislatures. And one of the things they did was said, all right, you know, what we need to really pull the South out of despair is to set up free schools. But for white people only, we're not going to have black children in our schools, but we're going to have free public education for everyone else. Yeah. So that was just right off the bat. The first time public education was introduced in the South, it was segregated, which set the stage for segregation throughout a lot of the 20th century. The rest of the 19th century and a lot of the 20th century, right? And you'll start to notice, like, a lot of this stuff that the South dealt with and tried to saddle on its black citizenry

finds its origins in the black codes that were written in these state southern or southern state conventions of 1865. They just popped up everywhere. This is where it all began. Yeah. I mean, it's really pretty despicable, like the idea that these people were finally freed by law. And they said, well, here, you know, let's just make a bunch of laws then. Like, remember the good old colonial times when we had all these laws? Let's just do that again. So we can remain in power. We can keep our status quo going. And sure, we might have to pay some wages now. I tried to look and find what wages might have been. I'm sure it was, you know, a pittance. But that was kind of the only thing they would acquiesce to. Otherwise,

they wanted it to look and feel and smell exactly like it did during the enslaved period. Yeah. And they had to acquiesce to that because part of the requirements for returning to the Union as a state was to have abolition of slavery and support abolition of slavery. And then also, there was a constitutional law now with the 13th Amendment that said, there's no more slavery in the United States. It doesn't matter where you are. You can't enslave anybody. So they had to do that. But it's like you said, they figured out every mental gymnastic they could make to recreate the slave economy in this new context of people being free and you not being allowed to have slaves anymore. Right. I think that's a good setup. Okay.

Feels like a break time. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, it does kind of feel that way. Do you feel that way? I feel it. I definitely feel it. Wait, I'm not feeling so much like a break now. All right. Well, let's keep going then. No, no, no. Okay. I'm feeling like a break. It came back. Okay. It came back. All right. We're going to take a quick break. I wonder if we did that for like 10 minutes, like a family guy episode, if people would just turn it off. Yeah. I'm sure a lot of them have already anyway. All right. We'll be right back. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise

or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody,

yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages,

K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. So Christmas is approaching at the end of, I guess, what is that? 1865. And there were a couple of rumors floating around these different communities. One was in the black community, they were like, hey, I hear for Christmas, we're going to get 40 acres

in a mule for every family on Christmas Day. And so let's not sign any work contracts or anything. Let's see what kind of happens here. We may be able to have our own farms and to work for ourselves and to be enterprising families on our own. And the other rumor that was going around was in the white community in the south, which was, hey, they all think that they're going to get 40 acres in a mule. This is not going to happen. They may be giving out a little bit of land here and there, but this is definitely not happening. And when this goes down on Christmas Day, there's going to be a huge rebellion and it's going to be a big problem for us. Right. And I was looking into that 40 acres in a mule thing. Apparently it all came out of a

William Tecumseh Sherman Field Order number 15, where he basically said everything from Jacksonville to Charleston, 30 miles inland, is going to be set aside for newly freed slaves to basically own and live and work. And it was just meant to be this little area. It never was fulfilled, but somehow that got turned into, among the black community in the south, 40 acres in a mule, which I had never heard before. Like I just thought the government had always promised everybody 40 acres in a mule. Yeah. I wasn't sure about the origins of that. And I knew that they were going to reappropriate some land, but yeah, I never knew that it was not an earnest sort of offer. Well, they also, it was based on the idea that the north had confiscated tons of land from

the Confederacy. And so they did think that they were going to redistribute it to newly freed black Americans. But apparently part of the Johnson plan was to give that land back to the original owners. And so that's how it got scuttled. That's right. So all this stuff is going on. There's a lot of people scared on both sides. There's a lot of fear. And this is kind of the background that set up these black codes, mainly in Mississippi and South Carolina. So I saw there were black codes in other states. I know Texas had one. I believe North Carolina had one. I think a lot of the Southern states, if they didn't actually enact them, then they were, they had written them or drafted them or trying to at least. But I think South Carolina and

Mississippi's were maybe the most heinous of all of them. Yeah. I mean, sure. I think Mississippi's was supposed to be even worse in South Carolina. Yeah. That was what I saw as well. Mississippi seems to have been the worst of the worst. But these codes fell into a sort of a group of four or five different ways that they could restrict someone's rights through law with technically skirting the abolition amendments. And basically what they did is they figured out that if you wanted black people to work, because there was this idea that among Southerners, among white Southerners, I should say that black people wouldn't work on their own. They had to be forced into work through like slavery or they had to be forced into work by some other new law.

But if left to their own devices, they just wouldn't work and the economy would fall. So that was the idea at least. I don't know if that was a pretext for just some deeply racist stuff or that was deeply racist. But if it was really just that was the kind of idea that was supporting like the money class and that idea trickled down into white society in the South, I'm not sure. But that was kind of like the premise that they were going on when they were writing these black codes, trying to figure out how to force black people into work agreements that benefited the white people they were working for. Yeah. And it's even a little more despicable than you might think because they also dressed it up with a few basic rights that you read stories and you don't

know how widespread it was. But even some of these basic rights, I think many times weren't enacted. They may have been on the books or at least offered on the books. But in order to be a person of color back then and to say like, Hey, wait a minute, it says here that I can sue somebody and I can acquire my own property and I can enjoy the fruits of my own labor. They have to be able to hire out an attorney and get it in front of a judge. And all these things were next to impossible basically. So even if they did dress it up a little bit with some basic rights, these weren't rights that were being enshrined. Right. Or even if they were, it's like, Oh, wow, thanks a lot for some of the most basic human rights that should be afforded

to anybody like recognizing our marriages as legitimate. Right. Apparently in the antebellum South, black people were viewed as so subhuman that they couldn't possibly marry one another in any kind of context that white people saw marriage and their children were all by definition then illegitimate. Well, in the super progressive post-Civil War South, now their marriages were recognized as legal and their children were recognized as legitimate. How far have we come? Basically the white Southerners were saying to themselves. As long as you married another black person, by the way. That was the other thing too. You said you can sue all that kind of stuff. You could sue another black person. You still could not sue a white person. You couldn't

have anything to do with the arrest of white person. The best you could hope for is to go down to a judge and fill out a complaint against a white person. Conversely, Chuck, at least I believe in, it might have been in South Carolina or Mississippi. If you were a white person, you could arrest any black person you wanted for even a misdemeanor. Like any white person could arrest any black person, but a black person could only fill out a complaint against a white person in front of a judge. Right, where it went into the circular file. Yeah, and you probably were risking your health, well-being and possibly life by filing a complaint or filling out a complaint against a white person as a black person in the post-Civil War South.

Yeah, absolutely. We'll talk about other civil rights that were violated along the way or at least limited, but another big way these black codes helped restrict their freedoms ultimately was through something through these labor contracts. They basically said in South Carolina that if you want to work, then you will work as a servant. We're not going to call you a slave anymore. You'll be a servant and we're still going to be called masters and you have to sign this contract and we will pay you a wage. It'll all be in writing. It has to be approved and witnessed by a judge, but here's the deal. You have to live on our property. You have to stay quiet. You can't get in the way. You have to work from sunrise to sunset, except on Sunday. You can't leave. You

can't go anywhere. You can't have visitors. Basically, everyone's looked around and said, well, what's the difference, this small wage that we're being paid? They said, yes, basically. They're like, yeah, that's everything. That's the whole thing right there. I also saw Chuck in one place that the wages that were paid to these new black servants who were formerly slaves were basically what the white plantation owners had been spending to feed and clothe and house their slaves. For them, there was basically no change in net gain or net output. It was just now they were directing that toward the black workers as wages instead. That's it. That was the only difference. I wonder if they charge them rent. I don't know. I saw that in some cases,

they did have to house people who stayed on their land, but I think that they were allowed to charge them rent. They were also allowed to deduct from their wages for a sick time. Yes, there were ... I get the impression that there was a lot of ways that you could take back a lot of those wages that you paid somebody. One of the other ways that you could take back that money is through your local town store, which set up a system of what's called debt peonage, which is the whole company store set up that miners in the north got into in the early 1900s. You have a little 15 tons of coal, but you can't go to heaven because you owe your soul the company store kind of thing. That found its root in the south in around 1865, where if you were in this labor contract,

you could go to a local store and offer half of your crops as a capital and then start borrowing. All of a sudden, people who had been enslaved before and could have nothing now had free credit at the local store. When the credit was called in at the end of the season, when they harvested their crops, they frequently found not only were all their crops taken, but all the stuff they had bought was being called back in and was taken to cover their debts because of huge crazy interest rates involved. They were trapped in this cycle where once they entered, and they had to, Chuck, you said it yourself, they had to engage in these labor contracts. Once they entered them, they did not get back out. All of the advantage was toward the white plantation owners and the white

store owners. They're also allowed to whip anyone under 18, any servants under 18. If it was someone over 18, you could get a judge's permission basically to whip somebody. If it got just so bad that they said, I can't do this. I'm quitting this job. I'm breaking this contract. Then they were basically like, all right, well, you're not going to get paid anything then. They could take back their wages and they were essentially forfeited and they could be arrested. The judge could say, nope, you're going to rat back to where you came from because you broke a contract. It's just reskinned as an enslaved person escaping and being returned to their master. Right. You would say, okay, well, how about you just don't work? There's your answer right there.

They could just say, I'm not going to work. Maybe I'll just hang around and try my luck just hanging out. It would make a lot more sense than ending up in debt and having to work for my former plantation owner. They had that figured out too. As part of the Black Codes, Chuck, if you were caught without a labor contract, you could be arrested. You were unemployed. Yeah. For being... It was a crime to not have a job. That's exactly right. If you were black. Yes. They figured out how to force black people into work by saying, it's illegal for you to not have a job. The big horrible irony of the whole thing is, if you were arrested for what they called vagrancy, you would go to jail. They would say,

you owe us this huge exorbitant debt. Is there any white plantation owner who'd like to come pay this debt? A plantation owner would come along, pay the debt and say, you now belong to me because your debt was just transferred to me and I'm going to put you to work until you pay off this high exorbitant debt and you're going to be stuck in that same cycle as you would have been if you just engaged in the labor contract to begin with and not been arrested for vagrancy. Right. Or they could say, well, actually, Your Honor, I learned quite a bit about carpentry or smithing. I'm a great smithy. Didn't we learn that what they were not called smithies? No. They have to be, though, forever. It's just too great a word, you know?

Like, I'm a cobbler. Like, I really have a lot of talent, so I'd like to open up my own shop and I think I can do this. I have a lot of driving initiative and the judge would say, no, no, no, I'm sorry. I don't think you understand. You have to work. If you want to work, you have to sign a work contract and work for a white person. You can't open up your own business or you're a vagrant. And then they would say, well, what about those white guys over there? They don't have jobs. And they said, well, but they're allowed to sign oaths of poverty to get out of jail. So, well, can we do that? No, you can't do that. So it's essentially just two separate systems set up from the beginning with these black codes, two separate groups of

laws depending on your skin color. And Chuck, one of the other owners parts about this is they're like, oh, if you're a minor, you don't escape this either. Like, there's something now called apprenticeships, which is basically like vagrancy laws for kids. And you can be put to work as an apprentice and you don't even have to be paid. If you're under 18 for a woman or under 21 for a man, you can be apprenticed out to somebody. And apprentice can be like, you're still a field worker. It doesn't mean you're actually learning a trade. Although some places did specify they did have to have to be taught a trade and fed in clothes. And for all intents and purposes, you were an enslaved person just as much as you were before, because you weren't being paid for

the labor you are now being forced to do. Well, and they could, I think they could even take the kids. Yeah. And just say, I'm sorry, your parents are negligent. And so we're going to take you and print it and put you in our apprenticeship. I don't know, I think they probably even called it a program. That gives it a little too much value. But they said, you know, sorry, your parents are negligent, we can take you. You have to work for me if you're a young man until you're 21, or if you're a young woman until you're 18. And that's the, you know, it's, there's a man called, what was his, I know his last name was Blackman. He wrote a book called Slavery by Another Name that had a lot to do with this. And there was one story in here about a gentleman named Green

Cottonham. This was in 1908, mind you, this is way, way, way later. He was arrested for vagrancy in Alabama in 1908, auctioned off to US Steel, where they chained him to, they chained him up, put him in a coal mine in Birmingham and said, all right, this is your new life. You have to do this until your fine is repaid. If he, you know, if he collapsed, he was whipped. If he died, he would be buried in a pauper's grave with everyone else. And I think out of the thousand Black men who were working for US Steel in less than one year, 60 of them died from homicide, accidents, or disease. And this was in 1908. Yeah. The North's hands aren't clean about this. And that was something that like,

you know, the North frequently gets a pass on that, especially among just kind of like the white view of history, that it was all the South's fault, that reconstruction failed, that the South was unwilling to kind of progress forward and accept Black people into society. That was definitely true. But they were aided in some ways by the North. And the North definitely was engaged in some of these unsavory practices as well. I think that's definitely worth pointing out. So we talked a little bit about different laws, depending on your skin color. This wasn't just like a subjective opinion. Like they literally did this with their courts. They did have certain new, technically certain new freedoms for court, like we talked about suing someone,

but could only be another person of color. You could be a plaintiff or a defendant, but only in cases, well, I guess a plaintiff, only in cases where there was another person of color involved. And the penalties were way different. I mean, a lot of the times you get the death penalty if you were Black, you would, for the literally the same crime, you would not get that penalty if you were white. And even minor offenses, like the smallest things you could imagine that you would be brought in for, you would either be hired out and worked, you know, 12, 14 hours a day or you were whipped. Right. And so the idea was that they were making it basically illegal to be Black, and they made it illegal to be unemployed. And they set up a

system so that everybody, all Black people, newly freed Black people in the South, were funneled into this economic system that favored white people and tried to recreate slavery as best as possible. Right. That's right. And one of the ways that they got away with this, one of the ways around this that was, that really kind of brought jail into the forefront of this initiative to recreate the slave economy in the South, was actually found and is still found in the 13th Amendment of the Constitution, the amendment that abolished slavery. It said, you can't enslave anybody, anywhere in the United States, except unless as a punishment for a crime, where the party shall have been duly convicted. There is a loophole in the amendment to the

Constitution that abolishes slavery and says that if you've been convicted of a crime, you can be used as a slave as punishment for that crime. And that really got the attention of the Southern legislatures after the Civil War. And they said, oh, okay, all right. Well, then how about we just start arresting Black people en masse? And that's what drove that whole illegalization of being Black in the South that was written into the Black codes. Yeah, it was, you know, that's why they did the vagrancy laws. That's why they did the apprenticeship laws. It all was just sitting there in front of their face with this massive loophole. And it was still allowed to happen, well, to a certain degree, which we'll get to

in a sec. Well, there's one good example. Let's give them the example of the pig laws real quick. Yeah, pig laws were certainly in other places, but definitely in Mississippi I found where they basically tried to make any crime that it might be more likely that a Black person might commit way, way more prosecutable. Like grand larceny went from $25 to like $10. And the big one, which is why they call them pig laws, was any farm animal that was stolen. And these could, you know, a farm animal could have a value of like a dollar or less. They said that is also grand larceny, because they knew that a, you know, formerly enslaved person might be more likely to steal the chicken for dinner so they could eat and survive and make that a literal grand

larceny offense. Right. Like grand larceny, punishable by five years in jail, during which time you could be leased out by the state to work for peanuts on a plantation for a white business owner. That was the setup. The sad thing is, is a lot of people today, a lot of social and historical critics say, yeah, it's still going on. That loophole's still there and there's still a lot of slave labor being used. And even if you're not being, if you're not, not being paid for that labor, you're being paid so little that you might as well be a slave. I think there was the most recent sentences, it was in 2005, the most recent prison labor sentences. They found 1.5 million prisoners were working, 600,000 of which were working in the manufacturing center. Most

of them were making two dollars or less a day if they were being paid at all. Geez. And Chuck, I know, you know, there's an awesome documentary on Netflix about the 13th Amendment and the implications it has. Just, it's called 13th and it is a, it's one of those documentaries that's like life changing after you watch it. I encourage everybody to go watch that documentary. It's just that good. All right, should we take a break? Yes. All right, we'll be right back. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke,

but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, after the Civil War ends, the union says, okay, Southern states, come back. Come back. Go write your new state constitutions. Show them to us and let's see what you got. And the Southern states went off in 1865 and held their all-white conventions and wrote their new all-white laws. Actually, they're all black laws, I should say. And they came back to the Congress of the United States and said, okay, first let us just explain before you make any judgments. And the Congress was not at all amused by this. It was not very surprising, but there was a huge swath of Congress called the Radical Republicans who were, they wanted the South punished. They

were deeply offended that the South had taken up arms against the nation. They hated slavery. They thought it was disgusting. They thought the South was backwards and it needed to be modernized. And they were not in any kind of particular mood for allowing concessions for racist slave owners trying to recreate the slave economy. And it brought Congress crashing down upon the South in the form of Reconstruction. Yeah. I mean, they basically said, you know what, we're not going to seat anyone you elect to Congress. We're going to invalidate any of these laws that you're putting on the books. And some of these Southern states said to themselves, like, uh-oh, I think I see the writing on the wall. This is really bad. And if we want to have any kind of agency of

self-rule, we might need to walk back some of these black codes a little bit, because it's clear that they're not hip to what we're trying to do here at all. Right. They saw through it. I don't know how, but they saw through our motives and saw we're just trying to recreate slavery. So even though they had Johnson in office, they were like, we have one of our own as president. Um, he was vetoed by Congress and he was essentially kind of a hostile Congress toward Johnson and the South. Yeah. Johnson was the first president to be impeached. And he was saved from conviction in the Senate by just one vote. And it wasn't over him being a racist, but he definitely was a racist. He even said he vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which basically

said black people are citizens now, and this is what they deserve, just like any other citizen. And Johnson said, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, we've never done anything even remotely like this for white citizens. Why should we do it for black citizens? And like his veto even was racist. And he and basically everybody who wasn't on board with the radical Republicans viewpoint missed the idea that the newly freed, formerly enslaved black citizens that were now citizens of the United States needed a leg up to get on some sort of equal footing with white people to be integrated in society, that it would be a good idea for everybody to be on fairly equal footing so that society could move forward faster. And to do that, the people who in the economy,

yes, exactly. And to do that, the people who used to be slaves needed a little bit of a leg up because they've been kind of held back for 400 years at that point, or a couple of hundred years at that point. So that was kind of the premise that the radical Republicans were basing all this on. And all of the conservatives were saying, no, this is too much. It's too fast. It's too radical. This is a problem now. And the southern states started to kind of get the sympathy of some northern conservatives. Yeah. I mean, it's not like they were talked into racist attitudes, but they were kind of talked into like, hey, you know what's going to happen if these freedmen start holding office and they start getting in positions of power is, you know, their people

don't want to work. So they're going to get laws passed that basically see to the fact that they don't have to work and they can just live off of us. And we don't want them to get in like, I think in 1867, a couple of years after the initial proposition proposition of these black codes is the first time that these freedmen actually participated and voted in elections. And these white southerners essentially kind of put the fear of God into these northerners saying, you see what's coming, right? And they kind of fell for it. They did fall for it. There's a really excellent article that I would encourage everybody to go read on jackabin.com. It's called Killing Reconstruction by Heather Cox Richardson.

And she basically lays out how the south said, okay, all of our racist views are falling on deaf ears up north. They don't really like the racism thing. What else could we do? And somebody said, what about classism? And they said, oh, yeah, there's a lot of rich people up in the north. They're going to love our classist argument. And so what they said is exactly what you were saying, that if you let these people who haven't, haven't ever earned anything in their life get elected to office, they're going to get ahold of all this taxpayer money and they're going to redistribute wealth. They're going to take hard earned white wealth and redistribute it to lazy shift, shiftless former black slaves. And do you really want that? And by the way, it has nothing

to do with being black. If you let any worker do that, if you let any worker vote, any worker get into office, they're going to redistribute wealth. And even today, Heather Cox Richardson makes a really great connection to today, where if we talk about an activist government, a government that says, we're here to really help raise the well-being of everybody. People say activist government and they want to redistribute wealth and it's probably either run by or being run for the benefit of people of color. That whole idea still goes on today and it finds its roots in the post-Civil War reconstruction south, where the Southerners finally got the ear and the sympathies of the Northerners by shifting the focus from racism to classism.

Well, they scared them financially. They're like, this is going to hit your pocket book. Right. And that really pricked up their ears at that point. It did. And so people say, well, reconstruction was abandoned and that's exactly right. It was an astounding project from 1865 to 1870. Three different constitutional amendments were introduced, passed, and ratified that ended slavery, that ain't created due process of law, and that gave black men the right to vote. Within five years, there was like, it was very promising. Black people were running and being elected to southern town councils, state legislators, judgeships, like things were happening. But then when the North kind of lost interest

or lost its initiative to keep going, it just fell apart and the North definitely turned its back on black southern Americans and left them out high and dry and opened the door for Jim Crow laws. Yeah, I feel like as guys, I mean, I'm from the South, but you've lived here quite a while. Like, I feel like we're always saying, hey, listen, it was a problem all over the place, everybody. And it's true. But this is, I don't know, it's hard to sort of break the, I mean, the stereotype is there for a reason in the South, obviously, but I think there were just so many complicit corporations and rich white Northerners that we need to bring that up. Well, the KKK sucked a lot of the oxygen down toward the South as far as blame goes.

Oh, sure. Because they definitely did engage in a terror campaign to like get black people out of politics and out of like the idea that they should be participating in society. And then even when black people went ahead and did it, if the KKK wasn't around, just Northern or normal white townspeople would riot and like kill like black office holders and to keep the status quo going. So, I mean, like it was, when the North left, they just completely left black Southerners out to dry. Like in one of the biggest betrayals that's ever taken place in the history of this country. Yeah. I mean, definitely, I know that that NIMBY is sort of a modern internet phrase. Have you heard of that? No. Not in my backyard?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I've heard that. I've never heard the acronym there. Yeah. Now, I mean, you know, how it is these days, everything is just shortened. So, now you just say NIMBY on social media. But there's a lot of NIMBY-ness going on back then. For sure. For sure. And the idea that, oh, it's not because they're black. It's because they're poor workers. We can't give poor workers rights. That it made it a lot more palatable for Northerners to kind of take part and feel okay about themselves with that. That's right. So, again, we just want to say what we were talking about, these black codes, and the two types of reconstruction. We're talking about like a one to 15 year period in

American history, but it's one of the periods that has some of the farthest reaching repercussions that are still around today. And it's just astounding to me, like that it went from slave codes to black codes to Jim Crow laws. And then finally, the civil rights era got America to say, hey, on paper, we're not racist any longer, which is where a lot of people end it. But those are the same people that point to the civil rights era and say, see, America's not racist anymore, which is probably the gaslighting-ist gaslighting you could possibly experience in America today, if you ask me. That's right. And hey, if we're recommending documentaries along these lines, I'm going to recommend the HBO four part documentary, Exterminate All the Brutes. Have you seen that

one? No. It's great. It's made and narrated by Raul Peck. And it is a four part series that basically draws the line from the very beginning, like the very first efforts at colonization and genocide by the Spanish, however many hundreds of years ago that was. And he basically kind of covers colonization and genocide over the years throughout history. But the way he draws direct straight lines from then to now, and what we're looking at now in America and all over the world is really impactful. It's hard to describe how some of it is straight up documentaries, some of it is recreations, but like really, really good historical recreations while he's narrating. And he just uses amazing graphics to illustrate, to really hit home a lot of stuff.

I mean, it's like going to school. It is super dense and heady, but I really recommend if you got four hours to kill, Exterminate All the Brutes is great. Yeah, that's what kept coming up for me when we were researching black codes. I was like, oh, that's still going on today. Oh, that's still how a lot of white people think about black people today. It's nuts, like how much of our society is still just kind of predicated on these terrible impressions that were created and perpetuated by the Southern Planner class. Yeah, and that's why it's super frustrating when anyone ever says like, oh, this is America. Everyone just has an equal shot in this country. I don't want to hear anything else. Yeah. I just, I can't even, you know,

it's hard to even have a discussion with someone who says something like that. I know what you mean. Jim Crow was not that long ago. No, it wasn't. We'll keep chipping away at it, huh? Yeah, and we'll, I mean, Jim Crow's sort of been something we wanted to cover for a long time. For sure. Okay, well, in the meantime, if you want to know more about black codes, there's a lot of ink that's been written about it, and it is all really good and interesting and eye-opening, and you should probably spend a little more time researching it. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this just a letter of thanks from one of our oldest, you know, most long-time listeners. I think Ian Clarkson has been listening for a while.

Oh, yeah. Enjoyed Into the World was a movie crusher when that was around, and this is from Ian, and Ian legit freaked out that I'm reading this, so that always makes me happy. Yeah, for sure. Howdy from Dallas, guys. I wanted to reach out and just begin by saying thank you for all the joyful content you provide the world during the gloomy time of COVID and adolescence. I really needed a boost that y'all provided. I've listened since I was 17, now I'm 25, and if you stuff you should know is my classroom, long since I've exited school, Josh drove me to get my archaeology minor. Wow. And Chuck is, I know, how about that? And Chuck has given me and my family endless amounts of movies and nights of joy. We outsource a lot of

our movie picking to Chuck, actually. All of you are wonderful humans, and I just wanted to reach out and express my pure joy that I receive from stuff you should know. I cannot thank all enough for being so insightful and kind with what you create. I hope to one day be able to share your catalog with my kids. I've written in once before when I was in high school, too, but I thought I'd reach out again. Both of you remind my parents of click and clack. We've gotten that from a bunch of people. That's the highest praise you can get. It really is. Anyway, hope all is well, the stuff you should know, podcast office, and that you're all enjoying your descent into the holidays. Your loyal fan,

Ian Clarkson. Ian is a great dude. Yes, that was a fantastic email. Ian, thanks a lot for that. And hello from us. That's right. A hearty hello. That's right. If you want to get in touch with us like Ian did, you can send us an email too. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this

situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Shatikler. And it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.