The legislature reconvened in December 1865 and responded by passing Alabama's notorious Black Code, which, like black codes passed in other states, rigidly controlled and managed the lives of black citizens.
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Rather than guaranteeing equal rights in the constitution, the drafters instructed the legislature to "pass such laws as will protect the freedmen of this state in the full enjoyment of all their rights of person and property, and guard them and the state against all evil that may arise from their sudden emancipation." While the drafters promoted protection for freed slaves, they suggested to the legislature that the best form of protection for both the freed slaves and the state would be the development of a new form of second-class status and citizenship. For instance, the new political order limited free blacks' capacity to make choices about labor contracts and heavily promoted formal marriages between free blacks while prohibiting interracial marriage. The state's first postwar constitution, drafted in 1865, actually cut back on equal rights for freedmen that had been present in Alabama's antebellum constitutions. The supremacist underpinnings of the constitution persisted until judicial decisions in the 1950s and 1960s rendered them inoperable, and some segregationist language, like the ban on interracial marriage, remained in the constitution until Alabama's voters removed it by constitutional amendment in the twenty-first century.Īt the end of the Civil War, Alabama had to reconstitute its state legislature. Formal and informal policies of repression, such as separate public accommodations, limited access to suffrage, and strict control over black labor, were put into place between the 1870s and the 1890s, and Alabama's 1901 constitution rested upon white supremacy as a basic element of governance. While many Alabamians informally and incompletely enforced separate living and working arrangements during slavery, the state's role in formalizing and codifying separation was a postwar development.
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As a comprehensive legal and social policy, segregation was not fully institutionalized in Alabama until the beginning of the twentieth century, but had its roots in struggles over how to deal with the realities of emancipation and federal legislation and constitutional change that gave blacks full citizenship.