Laws, enacted in the former Confederate states after the American Civil War , that restricted the freedom of former slaves and were designed to assure white supremacy.
They originated in the slave codes, which defined slaves as property. In some states these codes included vagrancy laws that targeted unemployed blacks, apprentice laws that made black orphans and dependents available for hire to whites, and commercial laws that excluded blacks from certain trades and businesses and restricted their ownership of property. Northern reaction to the laws helped produce Radical Reconstruction and passage of the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, as well as creation of the Freedmen's Bureau . Many provisions of the black codes were reenacted in the Jim Crow laws and remained in force until the 1964 Civil Rights Act .