AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, MILLIONS OF FORMERLY ENSLAVED AFRICAN AMERICANS HOPED TO JOIN THE LARGER SOCIETY AS FULL AND EQUAL CITIZENS. ALTHOUGH SOME WHITE AMERICANS WELCOMED THEM, OTHERS USED PEOPLE’S IGNORANCE, RACISM, AND SELF-INTEREST TO SUSTAIN AND SPREAD RACIAL DIVISIONS. BY 1900, NEW LAWS AND OLD CUSTOMS IN THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH HAD CREATED A SEGREGATED SOCIETY THAT CONDEMNED AMERICANS OF COLOUR TO SECOND-CLASS CITIZENSHIP. Segregated America

The Promise of Freedom For formerly enslaved people, freedom meant an end to the whip, to the sale of family members, and to white masters. The promise of freedom held out the hope of self-determination, educational opportunities, and full rights of citizenship.

John Adams, a former slave Now we are free. What do we want? We want education; we want protection; we want plenty of work; we want good pay for it, but not any more or less than any one else...and then you will see the down-trodden race rise up. Look at the following website and record 3 interesting facts about what John Adams did to help African-Americans get basic civil rights.

The US Constitution; We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Who created the US Constitution? When was it created? Why was the US constitution created?

The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constituion The Reconstruction Amendments intended to extend the rights of citizenship to African Americans. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) extended “equal protection of the laws” to all citizens; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude.” Why would African-Americans have been happy about the amendments to the Constitution ?

First vote The only way to guarantee freedom for formerly enslaved African Americans was to grant them the full privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. The right to vote became the critical step in protecting their civil liberties. It would also be the first of their freedoms taken away.

Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot. —Frederick Douglass, 1865

Emancipation The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freed African Americans in rebel states, and after the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated all U.S. slaves wherever they were. As a result, the mass of Southern blacks now faced the difficulty Northern blacks had confronted--that of a free people surrounded by many hostile whites. One freedman, Houston Hartsfield Holloway, wrote, "For we coloured people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free coloured person about them." What was the Emancipation Proclamation, how did it affect African-Americans and how long did it last?

Reconstruction. By the late 1870s Reconstruction was coming to an end. In the name of healing the wounds between North and South, most white politicians abandoned the cause of protecting African Americans. Research why Reconstruction came to an end and how this impacted African-Americans?

The Ku Klux Klan In the former Confederacy and neighbouring states, local governments constructed a legal system aimed at re-establishing a society based on white supremacy. African American men were largely barred from voting. Legislation known as Jim Crow laws separated people of color from whites in schools, housing, jobs, and public gathering places. What was the Ku Klux Klan? What did they do to African-Americans?

Taking away the vote Denying black men the right to vote through legal maneuvering and violence was a first step in taking away their civil rights. Beginning in the 1890s, southern states enacted literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and eventually whites-only Democratic Party primaries to exclude black voters. The laws proved very effective. In Mississippi, fewer than 9,000 of the 147,000 voting-age African Americans were registered after In Louisiana, where more than 130,000 black voters had been registered in 1896, the number had plummeted to 1,342 by 1904.

Poll tax receipt Poll taxes required citizens to pay a fee to register to vote. These fees kept many poor African Americans, as well as poor whites, from voting. The poll tax receipts displayed here is from Alabama

Jim Crow songbook This songbook, published in Ithaca, New York, in 1839, shows an early depiction of a minstrel-show character named Jim Crow. By the 1890s the expression “Jim Crow” was being used to describe laws and customs aimed at segregating African Americans and others. These laws were intended to restrict social contact between whites and other groups and to limit the freedom and opportunity of people of color.

Advertising Cards Insulting racial stereotypes were common in American society. They reinforced discriminatory customs and laws that oppressed Americans of many racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds. The cigarette holder and early 20th-century advertising cards depict common stereotypes of African Americans, Chinese Americans, Jews, and Irish Americans.

Separate but Equal: The Law of the Land African Americans turned to the courts to help protect their constitutional rights. But the courts challenged earlier civil rights legislation and handed down a series of decisions that permitted states to segregate people of color. In the pivotal case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially separate facilities, if equal, did not violate the Constitution. Segregation, the Court said, was not discrimination.

The Supreme Court The members of the United States Supreme Court, Under Chief Justice Melville Fuller, the Court established the separate-but-equal rule. Courtesy of Supreme Court of the United States

Plessy v. Ferguson In 1890 a new Louisiana law required railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races.” Outraged, the black community in New Orleans decided to test the rule. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy agreed to be arrested for refusing to move from a seat reserved for whites. Judge John H. Ferguson upheld the law, and the case of Plessy v. Ferguson slowly moved up to the Supreme Court. On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court, with only one dissenting vote, ruled that segregation in America was constitutional. (Courtesy of National Archives, Washington, D.C.)