Events
1866Congress passes Civil Rights Act of 1866
1868Fourteenth Amendment is ratified
1870Fifteenth Amendment is ratified
1871Congress passes Ku Klux Klan Act
1875Congress passes Civil Rights Act of 1875
1877Reconstruction ends
1881Booker T. Washington founds Tuskegee Institute
1896Plessy v. Ferguson ruling upholds
“separate but equal” doctrine
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.
