 Well, good afternoon everybody. Thank you for being here today. I'm Neil Romanoski. I'm the Dean of University Libraries. It's my pleasure to welcome all of you to the Graduate Research Series, which is collaboratively hosted by University Libraries, Graduate Student Senate, and Faculty Senate. This series celebrates and illuminates the research process of graduate students when we hear them share their research and the various successes and challenges and discoveries that they encountered in that process. So this afternoon, I'm delighted to introduce Ivan Mosley. We'll be speaking about his research, how to be good in black, the legacy of the black codes. Ivan is currently working towards a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting and a Master of Arts Administration here at Ohio University. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from Wake Forest University and is an alumnus of the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive and the Advanced Playwriting Program at the National Theatre Institute. In 2018, his play Evelyn and his brothers was selected as a semi-finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. So without further ado, please help me in giving a warm welcome to Ivan. And hey, all the rest of you that I did not say hi to. Thank you for being here. You could be anywhere else in the world, but I appreciate your presence that you're here. So guys, we are going to start my presentation. I'm going to share my screen with you guys and give like a thumbs up or anything if you can see it. Yep, we can see it. Cool. All right then. All right, so we're going to start from the beginning. All right, so this is my presentation, how to be good in black, the legacy of the black codes. And so the focus of my presentation today is the black codes of the 19th century. And so the black codes were laws that regulated free black labor in the late 19th century. The research, my research question is how do the black codes transform to affect African Americans today. And so the significance of the black codes is that they do see my research I found that they do still affect African Americans in some form today because they just transformed. They were repealed, but there were laws that went in their place. And so you have things like the war on crime and the war on war on drugs that just took their place. So my research, I find it important because this research builds on the work of such African American intellectuals as W.E.B. Dubois. Okay, and then we're going into my presentation content. So first we're going to go into my library resources. And then we're going to go into what inspired me to look at the black codes and what inspired me to write this play in general. And then we're going to go into my initial research. And then I'm going to give you guys some background information on the black codes. And then I'm going to go into commonalities within the black codes. And I'm going to then I'm going to move on to the effects of the black codes in the past and the present. And then I'm going to end with how this relates to my play. So my library resources. So shout out to Lorraine Wilkner. She has been a big help. She is the subject librarian for the theater and performing arts. And she also serves as the subject librarian for African American studies. So during our many meetings we use the search terms Negro, hetero-normative, black, colored, masculine, feminine, labor, laws, wage and work. And it led to so many other things. It was just like as soon as you searched one thing it led to something else and it led to something else. And it was just a spider web of research that we found. So I visited the following databases. So like the Oxford African American Study Center, Gender Watch, ProQuest, JSTOR, the Journal of Homosexuality, Alice, Articles Plus, Hate in America and Hine Online. So one of the most useful was the Oxford African American Study Center because that documented African American history from the 16th century to the present. Also Alice in Articles Plus and JSTOR and ProQuest were very helpful. And Lorraine also directed me to national organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And we also used eBooks. So what was the inspiration for this play? So as a queer African American person, I know firsthand that there is a link between queerness and blackness. And not only that, my mother and her siblings worked as sharecroppers in the 1960s and 70s. I hear so many stories of how her fingers got ants in them when she was twining tobacco or she was twirling cotton and she was putting it up in the pack house later in the day about dusk. So with slavery as my heritage, because sharecropping can be seen as another form of slavery, and I'm going to explain to you why later in the presentation. But yeah, so with slavery as a part of my heritage and with the queer experience as part of my heritage as well, I wanted to write a play that connected the modern African American experience to that of the 1860s. And I thought the best way to do that would be the black codes. Like I said, the black code codes regulated African American free labor in the 1860s, but they also changed to regulate black folks and their autonomy through the present day. So my initial research. So I met with Dr. Baena Jeffries, Chair of the African American Studies Department. Shout out if you are here. Then I met she directed me to Lorraine and then we started with the Oxford African Americans Study Center. And then we found excerpts from the black codes in multiple states, such as South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Ohio, because people often think that the black codes just were related to the south. But no, Ohio had some as well. And also, incidentally, these are all places that I've lived. And so let me give you some background information on the black codes. So after the Civil War, there are four million free black men and women as a result of the passing of the 13th Amendment, which outlaws slavery. There's a loophole in that amendment, but we'll talk about that later. So the southern economy after the Civil War was decimated because it mostly depended on an agricultural economy and the agricultural economy depended on enslaved black labor. And white people at this time were insulted because black people, they didn't have to stay on their property anymore. They could just just walk away. And so as a result, white people believed like black people were lazy and they needed proper motivation to work. Thus the black codes were passed between 1865 and 1866. They were later repealed. However, they were replaced with Jim Crow laws in the late 19th century and in the early 20th century. So now we're going to see some of the commonalities of the black codes. Black people had to have employment, but there are rules to that employment. So your employment had to be through a white man, first and foremost, and you had to renew those contracts yearly. You could not terminate the contracts and black people could work for themselves, but they had to have a court-approved license. And there could be anywhere from 10 to $100. And if you adjust that for inflation today, so $10 would be like $170. And $168 would be about $1,700. So I don't have that kind of mind lying around. It's a pandemic. But black people at that time certainly didn't have that kind of money around because they didn't have jobs as a result of slavery yet. So failure to provide proof of employment led to a vagrancy charge and imprisonment. And so what happened was you had to have proof of employment from your employer. So you had to have written proof. And once they imprisoned you, you went to prison and they could also lease you out to other plantation owners and other businessmen. And then we see the proliferation of slavery once again because of the master was known as the employer. And the employee was known as the servant. So all these, through the rules and through the titles, we're starting to see a return back to slavery again in form, if not name. And so now I'm going to go into the effects of African-Americans past and present. So the black code codes, because of the way they were structured, they led to the following. So the beginnings of the prison industrial complex. And then they also led to the exploitation of black labor and lowering of black wages. And they also led to the implementation of white patriarchal heteronormative standards. And so with the beginning of the prison industrial complex is a system with that in which the government and corporations collaborate to use prisons and other industries for profit. And so like in. So an example of this is how in Georgia, they use conflict labor to build a lot of the public work such as the roads. And so my resources for this section were the article Lexi's of the racialization and incarceration from Convict Lease to the prison industrial complex by A. E. Raza. And then I also use the e-book, the New Jim Crow mass incarceration in the age of color blindness by Michelle Alexander. And so here we are back to that loophole, right? So the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery. However, that loophole said specifically, except as punishment for a crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted. So lineman's terms is that they could use slavery as a form of punishment against criminals. However, they never defined what the crime was. And so the black codes were defining crime along lines of race through laws dealing with vagrancy, labor contracts and employment. And so and so continuing on before emancipation prison was used for mostly white people afterwards the prison system adapted to conscript mostly freed African Americans into forced labor through the black codes. And so the prison housing conditions were akin to those during slavery. For example, when W.B. Dubois was doing a study of prisons in Georgia, he found that that many of them didn't have a hospital, a doctor or a chaplain, even though they were required by law. Under the black codes, a conflict's labor could be leased out for the following reasons. The South was in economic depression after the Civil War and the states wholly endorsed it because not only did they have a sizable supply of cheap labor through the prisoners, they could use their labor to boost their profits to pay back some of the debts they incurred during the Civil War. And so the vagrancy laws from the black codes and Jim Crow transformed in the latter part of the 20th century to imprison even more black people. So this transformed into like the war on crime under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s and then then that transformed later into the war on drugs under Richard Nixon in the 1970s. And it carried through like several other presidential terms. It kind of lessened when Obama signed the First Sentencing Act in 2010, but the more or less the war on drugs is still being fought to this day, just not as intensely. And so the war on drugs went when Richard Nixon declared that he formed the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1973. And initially it had 1470 agents and the budget of less than $75 million. Today, however, it has nearly 5000 agents with a budget of $2.3 million. So it's almost three times the budget it was in 1973, but it's a little over three times what the number of agents was in 1973. And so Ronald Reagan expanded these policies with like mandatory sentences for specific drug offenses. So if you were caught with like crack cocaine, I forget the actual amount you had to have, you could get five years. But if you had powder cocaine, you would get an even softer sentence. And so Eric D. Larson compared a 1960 study of incarceration rates to a 2010 study. And in 2010 he found that black people were incarcerated at four times the rate they were in the 1960s. And Michelle Alexander in her book of New Jim Crow, she posits that there are more black people incarcerated today than there were during slavery. And so we also have the, with the black codes, we also have the exploitation of labor. And so for this, I use the following resources. So I use the article, Southern Labor Law, Explorative or Competitive by Jennifer Roback. I use another article, Separate and Unequal in the labor market. Human Capital and Jim Crow Wage Gap by Celeste K. Rothers and Mary Ann H. Wanamaker. And finally I use another article, Black Lives Matter in Building Bridges. I'm sorry, Black Lives Matter in Bridge Building Labor Education for New Jim Crow Era by Eric D. Larson. Okay, and continuing on. So because of the restrictions of the black codes, most black people had to go back to their farm master's presentations, right? And so this time when they went back, they had to sign contracts, these yearly contracts, right? And with these contracts, wages were paid over the lifespan of the contract, right? And they were paid higher wages around different times of the season because the contracts were based around agriculture and planting season, right? So for example, the closer it was to harvest, the more you would get paid. And if it wasn't close to harvest, the less you would get paid. However, the workers, they needed advances on their wages to live, right? So because they needed advances, they were always indebted to their employer. And there was a perceived con to this system of yearly contracts, right? Because the employers believed that all the workers had to do was breach contract before harvest. So they could just take their money and run, and they wouldn't have to come back. So by 1867, alternative contracts were widely used. And two of those that were mainly used were sharecropping contracts and rental contracts. And so this is, I'm about to explain to you why sharecropping was another form of slavery. So the worker planted crops, and they kept a small percentage, usually about a quarter and a half for themselves when their employer sold the crop at market. And the advances were further deducted from that share if they needed advances. However, the employer, they provided fertilizer, mules, and equipment for planting crops. And that could also be deducted from your share. So you're doing all the work, but the employer is reaping all the benefits just as in slavery. And then we're going on to rental contracts where a tenant could pay a fixed price for the land they worked. It could be a fixed dollar amount or just a fixed share of the crop. So that made the tenant responsible for the failure or success of the crop. And so either way, employers believed through these contracts, the planter or the worker was further incentivized to stay on the plantation or on the farm because they had a more vested share in the crop. And then continuing on. So after the black codes, the Jim Crow laws continued the de facto segregation of the school system. And so African Americans couldn't receive the same quality education as white people. And so because they couldn't receive the same quality education, they weren't receiving a lot of the same skills training as white people. So therefore you have not a lot of highly skilled African American workers, which led to a racialized wage gap. According to a work paper by Carothers and Wanamaker, in 1940 white people earned 25 to 32% more than African Americans. And as the 20th century continued, the separate but equal policies of Jim Crow and the black codes translated into the economic gap between blacks and whites. So you have mortgage policies and highway constructions which provided opportunities for class mobility and equity growth for white workers. However, black workers didn't get those same advantages. What worked for them, what worked for, sorry, white white workers didn't work the same for black workers because of those mortgage policies and that highway construction. It pushed black workers into poorly poor areas that didn't have the best funded hospitals nor the best funded schools. And even if, even as they gained access to unions, seniority policies within those unions and job segregation kept them in low paying positions. And today there are inequities still in black neighborhoods, especially with regard to heavy policing. And you don't even have support from like the labor unions because a lot of labor unions have remained silent on issues with black lives matter. For instance, when Mike Ferguson was killed, I found research that stated that a lot of the labor unions remain silent and discouraged anyone from speaking. on their behalf. And so there we're going to the implementation of white patriarchal heteronormative standards. And for this, I use the following resources. So aberrations in black toward a queer critique by noted black queer theorist Roderick A. Ferguson and then use another article that you used in the previous section. Black Lives Matter and Building Bridges, Labor Education for New Jim Crow era by Eric D. Larson. And so before emancipation slaves could exist in like non monogamous and sexually fluid relationships. No one really cared. However, with the black black clothes implemented after emancipation. Merges were regulated as between a black man and a black woman. Those African Americans who did not adhere were imprisoned and denied their pension. And so you have the connection between queer queerness and well, the denial of queerness and this patriarchal view of labor, right? And of relationships. And today, a lot of these heteronormative standards such as marriage and such as on labor have led to the death of many LGBT folk. A black person's life is taken by a police officer or vigilante every 28 hours and a black trans person's life expectancy is 35 years. And I want to also add, because of these heteronormative standards, trans folk who are sex workers can be arrested for walking while trans because there are several laws on the books that police just arrest them for walking just for walking if they believe they are sex workers. And these heteronormative standards have also led to discrimination in housing and environmental contamination for black LGBT folk. And then just continuing on for women under the black clothes and Jim Crow, they were relegated to work on the plantation and later domestic workers. As such, they did not receive many of the protection protections under the law such as mother's pensions for widows for most of the 20th century. Today, even late, there are labor law exemptions that still went render black women unprotected. And under Jim Crow, black women were deemed unwombly because their wage work included what would be defined as men's work such as lifting heavy materials. But during the Reagan era, when they decided to pursue unwavered work as mothers in their own home and seek government assistance, they were paying as welfare cleans who just wanted to exploit the system. And so now we're coming back, how does this connect to my play, right? And so my play looks at two queer black men, Jacoby and Remus camped out in the cotton field. And so my play mixes history with it, even just within this relationship because Jacoby is a contemporary urban night and Remus appears to be a slave from the late 19th century. The two men have opposing goals. So Jacoby wants to stop their journey to wait on Hippolyta so he can get wings to get away from Remus and specifically Remus and his stories because he feels that they are oppressive. And Remus wants to go further into the field because that's what they've done and he just wants to continue on that path. So unable to reach a decision, they decided to sleep on it. But when they awake, they are visited by Conjure Chestnut and his disciples, Timmins, Banjo, Augustine, and Gethsemane. Conjure advises Jacoby and Remus to avoid Hippolyta and remain where they are. So the question I'm asking throughout this place, can they trust what Conjure is offering and can they trust his crew? So how this relates back to the black codes is Conjure's followers seem to be affected by the black codes. They all refer to conditions for blacks after the Civil War. And for one thing Banjo has been in prison for vagrancy. And Augustine, his wife, could only find work on a plantation after the Civil War for a time. And Gethsemane allowed her body to be used for medical experiments to avoid imprisonment because she couldn't find work anywhere else. With these characters, my play is also mixing times. So it's connecting the modern black experience to the 1860s because Banjo's term of imprisonment seems like 100 if not hundreds of years. Because that represents the fact that vagrancy laws were used in Jim Crow and the black codes and they transformed into different policies throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. And Augustine works as a farmhand in the 1860s and a civil rights worker in the 1960s. And the experiments on Gethsemane correspond to those performed on African Americans throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. So as the black codes create a system to steal free black's physical labor, Conjure reveals himself to be a thief of souls. And when Hippolyta comes, she awards Remus the Wings instead of Jacoby. So that goes to show the black codes defined blackness as a crime. My play says blackness is queer connected tradition and ever evolving. And so in my play that is represented through Remus and Remus as a storyteller and Remus as a queer man and Remus as someone who is always looking to expand his knowledge and he's not just one thing. And when Jacoby is trying to get away from that, he's trying to get away from blackness in a way. The definition of blackness is queer and connected to tradition and ever evolving. And so by punishing him and giving and having Hippolyta give the Wings to Remus instead of him, what I'm saying is not having the definition of blackness as queer, as connected to tradition and ever evolving is really the true crime. And that ends my presentation, you guys. I have my email listed. If we can't answer any questions today, I'd be glad to email you back. Any further questions? Thanks so much, Ivan. Yeah, we're going to open it up to audience questions now. So feel free to type your question in the chat or raise your hand. Thank you, Ivan, for that presentation. It was very informative and interesting. My name is Kelly and we're going to library and I have a question for you while other people are typing out their questions. What was the most surprising thing you learned in your historical research? Most surprising thing. Well, the most surprising thing I learned is that there is still a lot of research to be done into how the black code codes affected queer women, queer people and black women. And I feel it's out there. And I definitely want to pursue that in the future as I am doing more research for this play. Thank you. That's very interesting. Yeah, I hope we're on the verge of understanding a lot more of that. Okay, since other people are still typing, I have another question, so I'm just going to pause the mic here. What advice might you give to a fellow student wanting to use historical research to inform their creative process? What would you tell them to do? So what I would tell them to do, find a subject librarian for that is specific to what you want to research and what you want to pursue. First off, but then once you have that research, immediately read it. But also give that research some time to faster in your mind. And so when you're giving it time to faster, you're giving it time to transform and you're giving it time to not only transform into theme, but you're giving it time to transform into character. And specifically, which character it applies to and the decisions that they make and also it also guides plot, right? Yeah, also guides plot because I didn't know Banjo was going to react the way he did until I found out that they imprisoned people for vagrancy and that they also further disenfranchised them even after they were released from imprisonment through things like voting laws and grandfather poll taxes. So yeah, just give it time to faster. And well, not faster, but transform is a better word for it. Faster faster has has negative connotations. Thank you. You're welcome. So I think we still have a couple of questions coming in in the chat. Steven wrote, he's interested to know how you launch from research to the creative process, which I think you already touched on. But he also says he's not researched a ton for place himself and is curious about how research shows up in the text when you're creating a play. Did you want to add anything more to the answer that you just gave Kelly or we've got another question in the chat that I can move on to if you feel like. Yeah, one more time. He's interested to know how you move from the research process to the creative process. Oh, okay. Yeah, man. Yeah, man, man, like I said, you have you have to sleep but but also. Yes. Yes. Sleep on it. Let it transform. Then also in a more specific way, ask your yourself as you are. As you are sleeping on it and letting it transform. What character does this apply to and and not only that, how does it result into action specific to that character? And and and what what and what is this this saying about the research that that I have so far? Does that make sense? Yes, yes. So we have another question from Miriam Intra tour. She says thanks for the fascinating presentation Ivan. I really appreciate how you laid out the library sources you use throughout your talk. Is there any information you really wanted or hope to find but could not. For example, a resource that seems not to exist or has not been have not been kept. Okay. Yeah, I want to find and and we it is just we we didn't. Yeah, I want to find more information on on conditions and. More more information on homonormative relationships within within the intabelle himself. It's out there. I just just just just didn't happen upon it yet. I know it's out there because we found some things. I just just want more and I'm curious about more more resources. More resources and I'm going to look on because. Lorraine Lorraine shout out to Lorraine again. She also get gave me resources in that areas as well. She gave me some starting resources in that area. But but also. I'm also so curious to. To look look into. To. Like what are. To. Sorry, sorry, my mind's blanking right now. I'm also interested in like what are. Mothers pensions and why specifically weren't they given to black women. And what were the benefits of those pensions and how long they could last usually for white women. And where were they enough enough to so that they didn't work. Is that what I because I know is also because black women during Jim Crow weren't perceived as motherly. But what were the benefits of it for white women and help and. And like what were the benefits of it for white women, but also. Like, like, like I said, how long did it last? What do they usually spend it on? Did it did it did it did it did it help them raise children? And if if so. What was the need still need need for for black labor and all that so so yeah I'm really interested in that as well. So yeah. And then I'm also interested in these labor law exemptions and how they're not not protecting black women. I want to look at that more. For the modern day component of it anyway. Thanks for that answer Ivan. We've got one more question in the chat. So generally is wondering if any of the area prisons would allow you to bring your play into the walls of the prison. And are there plans for the play to be presented here once restrictions are lifted? Okay, so the second question that's easier to answer. So I don't know specifically. There's the same thing we're going to do in person classes and everything. But but right now I'm not sure. As to if they will be restricted. I mean lifted for the. For for the theater program and when those restrictions are lifted, then that's when. I will be able to do do stuff in person. However, if they're they're not. We're still still going to do it for play. So so how that that process is going to work. Is that that we'll get get three developmental readings throughout out next year as a third year I will and then. And then so sometime. And in the fall we're going to start casting it. And then then I believe at that time I'll also be assigned a director or I'll look for a director myself. My. My my preference is to have a black director. Because I really, really want to get black directors a chance but but also. I am intent on forming relationships with with black artists because I want to return back to black theater. Moving on from that once once we've got the director and we've got that cast. And about late late March next year we're going to start rehearsals. And and then. We we will do we will start presenting the play like that second or third week in April. So so either it will be in person and if it's in person. Either be in Cantner or the radio broadcast building. And if it's online or zoom I'm fine with that that as well. And then as part of play fest we will also have mentors. Rear for for all three mentors that you like this time because I got lucky this time as well. But but yeah that that will be the process process for the play going forward for next year to include in the theatrical calendar. But will it be be performed in prisons? I haven't thought I haven't thought of that yet. And I haven't thought of how to make make that happen home because I don't see a lot of magical because it's also magical realist. And it's a little bit surrealist. So so I haven't seen a lot of but I haven't heard a lot of those plays being performed in prisons is more usually. More more like. Well Shakespeare's been formed in prison so so so now that I think that that you can never never say never. But but yeah. On a personal level I haven't I haven't thought about that yet. I'm dead to make a long story short. And thank you though. Thank you. I will dream big in the future. Thank you. I'm going to take your advice. I think we might have one more question coming in from Lorraine so. That's what I'm here for. Just thank you so much. So I think we're probably going to go ahead and wrap it up at this point. I haven't on behalf of libraries I want to thank you so much for the wonderful presentation and for your research. And thank you for sharing it with us. I am recording today's presentation and it will be available on the library's YouTube channel. Thank you all so very very much for spending a little bit of time with us this afternoon. Have a great day. Bye guys. Yes. Thank you. Thank you Steven. Thank you Kaylee.