The Civil Rights Era (1865–1970)

Events

Key People

• W. E. B. Du Bois

  Black historian and sociologist; pushed for equal economic and social rights and worked to develop “black consciousness” by promoting black culture and heritage

• Booker T. Washington

  President of Tuskegee Institute; campaigned for blacks to achieve economic equality with whites; thought blacks should pursue economic equality first, before social equality

Safeguarding Blacks’ Rights

After the Civil War ended in 1865, Radical Republicans in Congress attempted to protect blacks’ rights by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which enabled blacks to file lawsuits against whites and sit on juries. To safeguard these rights permanently, states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and enfranchised black men with the Fifteenth Amendment.

Congress also passed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which outlawed racial terrorism, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited racial discrimination in most public places. Radical Republicans also tried to use the Freedmen’s Bureau to redistribute confiscated southern plantation lands to blacks in order to put them on more equal footing with white farmers. In addition to these measures, Congress sent federal troops into the South to help blacks register to vote.

The Failure of Reconstruction

However, opposition from President Andrew Johnson, a conservative Supreme Court, and the white southern elite thwarted Radical Republicans’ attempts at protecting blacks’ rights. Johnson, for example, disbanded the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. Then, in the complex maneuvering of the Compromise of 1877, Republicans traded the presidency (the election of Rutherford B. Hayes) for the premature withdrawal of federal troops from the South. This compromise effectively ended Reconstruction and set back the hope of equality for southern blacks for decades. Within a few short years, the powerful white elite had returned to power in southern legislatures and had reinstated its racist policies in the South.

Sharecropping and the Black Codes

During the last decades of the 1800s, life for southern blacks was harsh. By 1880, most blacks had become sharecroppers, tenant farmers who essentially rented land from their former masters. Even though most former slaves actually preferred the sharecropping system to wage labor, it kept them bound to their white landlords in virtual slavery.

In addition, local statutes called black codes kept blacks “in their place.” These laws made “offenses” such as loitering, unemployment, indebtedness, voting, and even having sex with white women illegal for blacks. State authorities fined and arrested blacks who disobeyed these laws, so the codes effectively made racism legal. Moreover, the black codes gave the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan even more of a motive and opportunity to terrorize blacks. As a result, almost all southern blacks at the time lived in abject poverty and had virtually no social or political rights.

Racial Darwinism

Although northern blacks enjoyed more rights than southern blacks, they still suffered from severe racial prejudice. One South Carolina politician who believed in the “natural” racial superiority of whites claimed that the average black American was “a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour.” Another social commentator likened blacks to wild animals that operated only on instinct. It is therefore not surprising that most blacks even in the North were able to obtain only unskilled jobs and lived in some of the poorest neighborhoods.