Mississippi and South Carolina passed the first Black Codes in late 1865, and other former Confederate states followed. Vagrancy laws let police arrest Black people who could not prove they had a job. Apprenticeship laws let courts bind Black children to white employers, often their former enslavers. Other rules barred Black people from owning guns, serving on juries or renting land in towns.
People convicted under these laws were fined, and those who could not pay were hired out to work off the debt. This fed the convict leasing system, which the Thirteenth Amendment's punishment exception allowed.
Congress responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, and Reconstruction governments repealed many codes. After Reconstruction ended, similar rules came back as Jim Crow laws. Scholars trace a line from vagrancy and loitering laws to modern policing of Black communities for minor offenses.