Slavery was legal in roughly half of the states up until the Civil War. After
the war ended, the Constitution was amended three times to end slavery and ban
discrimination against blacks. But discrimination and segregation did not end until
the significant Supreme Court cases of the 1950s.
Reconstruction Amendments (1865–1870)
Adopted between 1865 and 1870, the Reconstruction Amendments to the
Constitution form the legal basis for the protection of civil rights:
-
The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) makes slavery and
involuntary service illegal.
-
The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) declares that anyone born
in the United States is a citizen of both the United States and of the state
in which the person resides; it also contains three key clauses:
- The privileges and immunities clause states that no state
can be deprive a citizen of the privileges and immunities of citizenship.
- The due process clause states that no person can be
deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
- The equal protection clause declares that all citizens
have the equal protection of the law.
- The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) declares that no person,
including former slaves, can be denied the right to vote on the basis of
race
Early Civil Rights Laws (1860s–1870s)
To supplement the Reconstruction Amendments, Congress passed several civil
rights laws in the 1860s and 1870s. These laws gave the president the authority
to use the military to enforce civil rights for blacks and made it illegal for
states to restrict voting along racial lines.
The Jim Crow Laws and Supreme Court Decisions (1880s–1900s)
After the federal troops withdrew from the South at the end of
Reconstruction in 1877, white southerners quickly took over state governments
and openly flouted the recent laws designed to protect the rights of former
slaves. Several state governments in the South went so far as to legalize
discrimination of blacks; these laws are known as the Jim Crow
laws.
Even though the Fifteenth Amendment gave all men the right to vote, the
southern states employed a variety of tactics to prevent blacks from voting,
including the following:
-
Whites-only primaries: Nonwhites were barred from
primaries because Democrats argued that political parties were private
organizations and thus not subject to antidiscrimination laws.
-
Literacy tests: Blacks were required to pass complex
tests that were graded by white election officials in order to vote.
-
Poll taxes: Some states required people to pay a fee in
order to vote.
-
Grandfather clause: If a person could prove that his
grandfather was eligible to vote prior to 1867, he could bypass the literacy
tests and other barriers; because no blacks could vote at that time, they
had to pass the difficult literacy tests.
Several Supreme Court decisions also weakened the civil rights amendments.
In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court held that the state
government could segregate public transportation and thus established the
separate but equal doctrine: Blacks could be forced into
separate accommodations, including theater seats and hotels, as long as the
accommodations were equal to those given to whites.
