From: The New American

The Racist Origin of America’s Gun Control Laws

… Even after abolition of slavery with the 13th Amendment, racist gun control laws were used to keep African-Americans in a state of subjugation. Across the former Confederate states, reconstituted legislatures in 1865 passed laws designed to reduce the status of African-Americans back to slaves without the name. These laws became known as the “Black Codes,” and even some of the Northern states — such as Oregon — enforced Black Codes for decades. In the South, many of the old slave codes were simply re-enacted, with the word “slave” struck out and “negro” or “freeman” inserted. Most also passed apprenticeship and vagrancy laws that placed African-Americans in long-term, forced agricultural contracts unless they carried work papers with a plantation.

Even their right to freedom of worship was taken from them under the infamous Black Codes. Ever since the abortive Gabriel Prosser slave revolt in Virginia in 1800, organized under the auspices of religious meetings, slave codes restricted black people’s religious gatherings. Mississippi’s Black Codes of 1865 likewise prohibited African-Americans from “exercising the function of a minister of the Gospel without a license from some regularly organized church.” Freedman’s Bureau Assistant Commissioner Thomas Conway testified to Congress on February 22, 1866 that in Louisiana, religious meetings were often broken up under a similar law that banned religious meetings after 9:00 in the evening: “There was an order issued at all the station-houses of the city, that the police in their various beats should break up any meetings of colored people held after 9 o’clock, and in some places meetings were broken up and the worshipers were all carried off to jail. This was done violently, and, on account of it, the city was almost reduced to a state of riot and revolution, the colored people having been unwilling to endure the persecution.”

But there was no armed resistance, since only the white population possessed guns. And the recently freed population of ex-slaves were often slaughtered by new secret societies bent on terrorism and murder, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Leagues (and after 1875, the less secret Red Shirts).

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