US Reconstruction Era
Reconstruction was the most ambitious attempt at racial democracy in American history before the Civil Rights movement. Federal troops occupied the former Confederate states, and freedmen — formerly enslaved people — were registered to vote, elected to state legislatures, and in some cases to Congress. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted citizenship to all persons born in the United States; the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited denying the vote based on race. 16 Black men served in Congress during Reconstruction; hundreds served in state legislatures. Public school systems were built across the South for the first time. Reconstruction was violently resisted by white supremacist organisations including the Ku Klux Klan (founded 1865), which terrorised Black voters and Republican officials. President Grant's administration fought back with the Enforcement Acts and briefly crushed the Klan in 1871. The contested election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877 ended federal enforcement: Northern Republicans agreed to withdraw troops from the South in exchange for the Presidency. The result — described by W.E.B. Du Bois as "the counter-revolution of property" — was the gradual imposition of Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, and segregation that would last until the Civil Rights Acts of 1964–65.
- Year: 1865 CE
- Category: Political
