Following emancipation, the number of people arrested in the Deep South rose significantly as the substance and enforcement of certain laws changed considerably. In stark contrast to the antebellum period, the vast majority of those now arrested were black. To keep up with the rapid pace of arrests, cities and towns that did not have police forces before the Civil War quickly established professional, uniformed forces during early Reconstruction. Atlanta, Augusta, Nashville, Memphis, and Richmond all created formal police departments. The undeniable proportion of race-based arrests caused concern, even during the initial years of freedom. In one petition to the Georgia’s Freedmen’s Bureau, the blatant racism of a particular judge was called into question after he punished several African Americans for speaking “disrespectfully” to whites. Indeed, the petitioners lamented, “the condition of the freed people is worse than slavery.”
By the mid-1870s, southern counties recorded alarming levels of racial discrepancy in convictions. Local officials became so heavily invested in policing the freedmen that by January 1875, the Greensboro Herald warned of a “heavy increase” in state convicts that fall, since local jails across the region were already filled to capacity. Emancipation, did, of course, provide the theoretical framework of black freedom, and laid the groundwork for a path towards citizenship. But the Thirteenth Amendment also provided the former slaveholders with a “slavery” loophole: involuntary servitude was completely legal in conjunction with criminal convictions. African Americans’ path towards citizenship would be long and hard, with many obstacles along the way. Despite idealistic promises from the federal government, overturning an entrenched system of racial slavery was a momentous task. Unless local governments were purged of Confederate sympathizers, true emancipation for southern blacks was nearly impossible. Historian Steven Hahn rightly concluded that “Vagrancy ordinances, apprenticeship laws, antienticement statutes, stiff licensing fees, heavy taxes, the eradication of common-use rights on unenclosed land, and the multiplication of designated ‘crimes’ against property constructed a distinct status of black subservience and a legal apparatus that denied freedpeople access to economic independence.”