Reconstruction and Jim Crow
Freed people gain citizenship and the vote, then lose most of it as white Southern rule returns through terror and segregation laws.
- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 — Eric Foner, Harper & Row (1988)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration — Isabel Wilkerson, Random House (2010)
After the war, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), making everyone born in the country a citizen with “equal protection of the laws”, and the Fifteenth (1870), barring racial discrimination in voting. Under federal protection, Black men voted and held office across the South; some 2,000 served in public office, including the first Black senators. Freed people founded churches, schools and colleges and searched for family members sold away.
- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 — Eric Foner, Harper & Row (1988)
White Southern resistance was violent. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups terrorised Black voters and their allies, and Northern commitment faded. After the disputed election of 1876, federal troops were withdrawn in 1877, and white “Redeemer” governments retook the South.
- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 — Eric Foner, Harper & Row (1988)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
What followed was the Jim Crow system: poll taxes and literacy tests that stripped Black men of the vote, segregated schools, trains and parks, which the Supreme Court approved as “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and lynching, which killed thousands of Black Americans between the 1880s and the 1940s. From about 1910, some six million Black Southerners left for Northern and Western cities in the Great Migration.
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration — Isabel Wilkerson, Random House (2010)
Why it matters today
The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of this era, promising equal protection and the vote, are the legal basis of modern civil rights, and fights over voting rules still echo the period. Many Black Americans see Reconstruction as a promise made and broken, and its collapse explains why the civil rights movement was needed a century later.