Phil Vischer and Vagrancy Laws

Hang with me through this one. There are going to be points where you may feel like I’m making a bigger deal about this than needs to be made, but there is much to look at here and I think, once we untangle some things that Phil Fischer said, there is a chance to look at the very real hardships black people faced after the Civil War in context.

In his video, Vischer seeks to show why household wealth differs in black and white households. This is certainly a subject worth diving into and I’m sure I’ll do a separate post on the varying thoughts on that. The first claim he makes is that “nine states enacted vagrancy laws, which made it a crime not to have a job,” and that these “only applied to black men.”

If I had made that statement in one of my papers for my college mentor (a Democrat whose wife was black), I can only imagine the amount of red ink I would get back. “Can you prove this?” would be scrawled across the top. Accuracy is important.

Phil Vischer cares a great deal about accuracy as it pertains to certain subjects, in particular when his Veggie Tales characters Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber were created. You can hear him talk about the unfortunate fact that some people think they were invented in 1993 by “Big Idea” instead of the real truth, that they were invented by him in his home in 1990. There you have it, now you know the real truth. Feel free to listen to more of this important discussion here.

Back to vagrancy laws. Vagrancy laws were certainly used by many Southern states to penalize black men, but to make the claim that they were exclusively applied to black men is something entirely different. In addition, his statement makes it appear that vagrancy laws suddenly popped up out of nowhere and were invented specifically for black men, that no one fought this abuse, and that all white people basically just did whatever they could to re-enslave newly freed men. This is a complicated issue so I’m going to try to give a brief history of vagrancy laws and then talk about “black codes.” My guess is that Phil Vischer is trying to explain a pretty complicated process and is possibly getting confused between these two issues.

Vagrancy laws were enacted in different time periods for different reasons. One set was enacted in the UK in 1824 to “deal with the increasing numbers of homeless and penniless urban poor in England and Wales following the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Nine years after the Battle of Waterloo the British Army and British Navy had undergone a massive reduction in size, leaving large numbers of discharged military personnel without jobs or accommodation. Many were living rough on the streets or in makeshift camps. At the same time a massive influx of economic migrants from Ireland and Scotland arrived in England, especially London, in search of work.“ (source)

That sounds a lot like the South after the Civil War. But let's not go there yet.

You can read about vagrancy laws throughout the Western World here. It lists a bunch of European countries and talks about how/why they were enacted. I’m just going to quote a giant chunk of this article below, which gives a much more accurate picture of vagrancy laws in the US:

“Colonists imported British vagrancy laws when they settled in North America. Throughout the colonial and early national periods, vagrancy laws were used to police the mobility and economic activities of the poor. People experiencing homelessness and ethnic minorities were especially vulnerable to arrest as a vagrant. Thousands of inhabitants of colonial and early national America were incarcerated for vagrancy, usually for terms of 30 to 60 days, but occasionally longer.[22]

After the American Civil War, some Southern states passed Black Codes, laws that tried to control the hundreds of thousands of freed slaves. In 1866, the state of Virginia, fearing that it would be "overrun with dissolute and abandoned characters", passed an Act Providing for the Punishment of Vagrants. Homeless or unemployed persons could be forced into labour on public or private works, for very low pay, for a statutory maximum of three months; if fugitive and recaptured, they must serve the rest of their term at minimum subsistence, wearing ball and chain. In effect, though not in declared intent, the Act criminalized attempts by impoverished freed people to seek out their own families and rebuild their lives. The commanding general in Virginia, Alfred H. Terry, condemned the Act as a form of entrapment, the attempted reinstitution of "slavery in all but its name". He forbade its enforcement. It is not known how often it was applied, or what was done to prevent its implementation, but it remained statute in Virginia until 1904.[23] Other Southern states enacted similar laws in order to funnel blacks into their system of convict leasing.

Since at least as early as the 1930s, a vagrancy law in America typically has rendered "no visible means of support" a misdemeanor, yet it has commonly been used as a pretext to take one into custody for such things as loitering, prostitution, drunkenness, or criminal association.[citation needed] The criminal statutes of law in Louisiana specifically criminalize vagrancy as associating with prostitutes, being a professional gambler, being a habitual drunk, or living on the social welfare benefits or pensions of others.[24] This law establishes as vagrants all those healthy adults who are not engaged in gainful employment.

In the 1960s, laws proven unacceptably broad and vague were found to violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[citation needed] Such laws could no longer be used to obstruct the "freedom of speech" of a political demonstrator or an unpopular group. Ambiguous vagrancy laws became more narrowly and clearly defined.

In Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a Florida vagrancy law was unconstitutional because it was too vague to be understood.

Nevertheless, new local laws in the U.S. have been passed to criminalize aggressive panhandling.[25][26]"

There is so much to unpack here. I’m going to be as brief as I can and encourage you to look into these things on your own:

1) Vagrancy laws have been in the U.S. since colonial times and were an attempt to keep “vices,” such as prostitution, drunkenness, and other criminal activities off the street. The logic is essentially that people with nothing to do will often find bad things to do. We can debate that all day, but it was the logic. You can check out this 1917 Virginia code, which kicks things off with addressing prostitution and the targeting of minors for sex.

2) There were large numbers of displaced and out of work blacks after the Civil War, and whites feared retribution and crime from this group, who often held understandable animus toward them.

3) Some people saw an opportunity to use vagrancy laws in conjunction with “Black Codes” (which gave new rights to blacks in some areas but limited their rights in others) to essentially re-establish slavery for some people under a different name, Read more here.

4) Politicians fought over these issues and many spoke out against them. Their enforcement and even existence varies a great deal across the country because people did not sit idly by in all areas and allow this to happen. In addition, many black people moved from areas with restrictive laws to areas with less restrictive laws.

5) History is complex. Each historical time period had just as many moving parts as our current world. People fought on both sides of every issue and oversimplifying this to “black people good/white people bad” is a Marxist tactic to bring about social upheaval in order to overthrow the world as we know it. That’s not an exaggeration. Read about Critical Theory, which is the driver behind most social movements today.

At some point I may write about vagrancy laws and the changing views on prostitution. Why is this important? In addition to us thinking through such crazy situations as Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, it’s important to note that Black Lives Matter supports the legalization of sex work and believes that police should stay out of this area. That’s right, in the age where most of us want to end human trafficking and sexual exploitation, BLM is on the other side.