Free
During the Civil War between the North and South, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
It freed enslaved persons in the southern states that were still at war. In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the rest of the country. The 14th Amendment in 1868 gave citizenship to African Americans, and the 15th Amendment in 1870 gave African American men the right to vote. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 said African Americans could not be kept out of hotels, theaters, and other public places. For a while, these laws helped the efforts of African Americans to become full citizens. But the laws were ignored more and more. Segregation became the unwritten law of the land.
▲ To excuse their inhuman treatment of enslaved persons, slave owners had to convince themselves that slaves were less human than they were. The myth of white supremacy had no basis in reality. Yet it became the justification for segregation after the Civil War.
The period after the Civil War is called Reconstruction. During this time, federal troops occupied the South, protecting the rights of newly freed enslaved persons. From Reconstruction until 1901, African American voters and their allies sent 22 African Americans to the U.S. Congress. Some African Americans created successful businesses and farms. However, the government provided no financial help for former enslaved persons. Without that, most had little hope for economic betterment. Pictured are freed slaves studying at a Freedman’s School in Charleston, South Carolina. ▼
◀ By 1877, the U.S. government had removed its troops from the South. It abandoned freed African Americans to the rule of former slave owners. Southern states passed what became known as Jim Crow laws, which enforced segregation and took away African Americans’ right to vote. “Jim Crow” probably referred to a song-and-dance routine done by a white singer wearing black face paint. The song and dance ridiculed African Americans.
After the Civil War, white supremacists turned to mob violence. Members of these groups falsely accused many African Americans of crimes and lynched them, usually by hanging. Racial terrorist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, exist today. The Klan was responsible for killings and bombings during the civil rights era. ▶
▲ Two prominent African American leaders had very different ideas about segregation. Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), above left, was born into slavery and founded Tuskegee University in Alabama. He believed that African Americans should accept segregation and work to make the best of their position in society. W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1963), above right, was born in the North. He believed that African Americans should demand equality in all parts of life. DuBois was among a group that in 1909 formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP was one of the first civil rights organizations.
▲ Over the years, many African Americans migrated North in search of work. Most ended up living in crowded inner-city neighborhoods. They worked at low-wage jobs with little chance of getting ahead. Segregation was not the law in the North, but it happened. White home buyers were sometimes asked to sign racial “restrictive covenants.” Those agreements said that white buyers would not resell their homes to African Americans. Segregated housing meant that churches, schools, and other neighborhood institutions were also segregated. Where African Americans were not segregated, they were frequently excluded outright from certain jobs and from restaurants and other public buildings.
