No, it's not that the law written 324 years ago and published in the Virginia book of Law of 1705 was active after that. It was active until 1865. The Negro Act passed in South Carolina in 1740 amplified this act by allowing negroes to be beaten and killed for appearing "rebellious". That law was a model of other slave states, about 15 in all, and lasted until 1865. The law looks forward, spreading and deepening behaviour over time. By 1865, the expectation built up in white men under the law conditioned superiority and the right of a white man to kill a black man without fear of jail, because the white men were carrying out the law. That type of hundred twenty five year conditioning just from that law, not counting the laws enacted and pass the years before that, lead to state's where white men legally were conditioned to violence over blacks. After that it got worse--scientifically speaking. At least judging by the over 360 laws passed racially restricting right of black American in 15 states until 1967. That strengthen the conditioning, not reversed, changed, or destroyed it.
That is why we saw no white men in groups feeling deputized and killing black men (and women) tried fairly in court for over 12,000 murders conducted in public, on roads, town squares, on streets and lampposts until the 1981 trial of three white men who killed Michael Donald in cold blood for nothing. After that, in the 1980s, they finally tried the white man who organized the killing of three civil rights workers in 1964 in Mississippi. That long without justice served against white for beatings, burning at the stakes of black, and murder and rape can leave no doubt of how we got to now. It is not "connecting the dots".
Laws are conditions we live under every day with the expectation of fairness and enforcement. Unfortunately for black Americans, those laws were filled with the expectations they would be attacked, segregated and deprived of their rights. But only until 1970. And the trials in the 1980s. Then they could expect that 300 plus years of white conditioning to start being reversed.
Sorry, my bad, I just looked it up and was wrong. Edgar Ray Killen was tried in 2004 for the 1964 killings, on the fortieth anniversary of the slaughter.
