The African American Experience during Reconstruction Post War Conditions in the North:  Industry is growing – more jobs and better economy  No real war damage Post War Conditions in the South:  Devastation, cities in ruins  Illness led to thousands of deaths  Economy shattered – veterans without jobs, farms & industry destroyed  4 million freed slaves without jobs or homes

REPUBLICAN PARTY IN THE SOUTH:  Scalawag: White Southerners who joined the Republicans – mostly small farmers who wanted to improve their economic situation.  Carpet Bagger: Northerners who moved south to help with Reconstruction  African Americans: Supporting Republicans, Have voting rights some are able to hold political office. Hiram Revels elected 1869 (from Mississippi) was the 1 st African American Senator in US gov; was college educated and had been a military recruiter during war and organized schools / churches for Af. Am.

Improvements: freedom to move Reunite with families Their own churches, schools, and communities Could vote and be members of Congress Freedman’s Bureau: (page 184) Set up by Congress to provide food, clothing, hospitals, legal protection, and education for former slaves.

Negative Results Share cropping:  System in which wealthy land owners divided land and rented it out; also known as tenant farming. Very difficult to make any money so most could never buy land.  Ku Klux Klan:  Vigilante group  Goal to destroy Republican party and throw out reconstruction government  Prevented African Americans from exercising political rights to vote  Support “planter class”  Killed 20,000 people from end of Civil War until 1920s

V OTING RESTRICTIONS: LITERACY TESTS if you couldn’t prove you’d been to school, you had to read a paragraph to vote Williams v. Mississippi, (1898) The Supreme Court did not find discrimination in the state's requirements for voters to pass a literacy test and pay poll taxes, since these applied to “all voters.” Although not obviously discriminatory, the educational test prevented blacks from voting: election officials could give a more difficult passage to a black and “passing” was arbitrary; a white man may be passed even if reading in halted English.  State Laws: Mississippi 1890, South Carolina 1895, Louisiana 1898, North Carolina 1900, Alabama 1901, Virginia 1901, and Georgia  The impact: in one county in Mississippi, with a population of about 8,000 whites and 11,700 blacks in 1908, there were only twenty-five or thirty qualified black voters

POLL TAX  Poll tax = pay to vote – most were too poor to pay  Georgia starts the poll tax in Every former confederate state by Although these taxes of $1-2 per year may seem small, it was beyond the reach of many poor black and white sharecroppers, who rarely dealt in cash. The Georgia poll tax probably reduced overall turnout by 16-28%, and cut black turnout in half. Not illegal until the Voting Rights Act of Later banned by the 24 th Amendment ratified in

GRANDFATHER CLAUSE if dad or grandpa could vote before 1867 – so obviously former slaves wouldn’t be able to vote A grandfather clause basically exempted illiterate whites, but not blacks, from the literacy test.

De facto Discrimination Racial Etiquette: Informal “rules” of behavior across the US – de facto discrimination (not by law, but by habit) No shaking hands Step off of the sidewalk Calling white men “Sir” Taking off your hat when a white person passes Violence: Those who didn’t follow “racial etiquette” could be lynched; between 1882 – 1892 there were 1,400 killed

DISCRIMINATION IN THE NORTH: DE FACTO Migrated North for better jobs; but were segregated in neighborhoods and discriminated against at work “last hired, first fired, lowest paid”