Up From Slavery
The African-American Struggle for
Equality in the Post-Civil War Era
The Hard Reality of Emancipation
• After the Civil War ended and the 13th Amendment
abolished slavery (1865), freedmen found themselves
without significant resources to start a new life
• The Freedmen’s Bureau (est. 1865) provided direct relief,
education, jobs, and medical care in an effort to give freed
slaves an opportunity to adjust to their new lives
• Despite such efforts, many blacks ended up as tenant
farmers who engaged in sharecropping – which involved
pledging a share of their harvest as repayment to
landowners who leased the land; debt peonage often
resulted as black farmers went into debt as a result of not
being able to cover costs and debt owed to creditors
The Failure of Radical Reconstruction
The Radical Republican attempt to re-engineer Southern
society and politics (1865-77) failed due to:
1. terrorism - as practiced by the Ku Klux Klan and other
white supremacist groups; violence and intimidation
kept reformers from carrying out Radical policies
2. redemption – Southern Democrats regained control of
their state governments as a result of the Compromise of
1877, which (after the disputed election of 1876) gave
Republican candidate Hayes the White House in
exchange for a Republican pledge to withdraw the last
federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction
3. “Jim Crow” laws created institutionalized segregation
through such measures as poll taxes, literacy tests, and
grandfather clauses – effectively disenfranchised blacks
despite rights provided in the 14th and 15th Amendments
Thomas
Nast’s
View of
the PostWar
South
The Supreme Court Limits Rights
• Ex parte Milligan (1866) – the Court ruled that military courts
could not try civilians where civil courts were functioning –
limited ability of the federal government to prosecute Southern
whites who violated the law
• Slaughterhouse cases (1873) – the Court created the concept of
“dual citizenship” – the idea that the 14th Amendment only
guaranteed national civil rights, not state civil rights; effectively
limited the scope of 14th Amendment due process protections
• Civil Rights cases (1883) – the Court further weakened the 14th
Amendment by declaring that it protected only against
government infringement of rights, not private infringement
(i.e., private businesses could still discriminate against blacks)
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) – ruled segregation legal as long as
facilities were “separate but equal” – not overturned until Brown
v. Board of Education in 1954
Two Views
of Progress
• Booker T. Washington, a
former slave and the founder
of Tuskegee Institute, argued
that blacks would only gain
acceptance by white society
through education and hard
work; patterned after his own
life experience
• Equality must first come on
socio-economic terms and
political equality would
follow; a popular approach
with white Americans
• W.E.B. DuBois, a northern
intellectual, argued that
blacks must achieve political
equality first before socioeconomic equality would be
fully achieved
• His approach was widely
adopted by civil rights
leaders in the 1950s/1960s
• DuBois helped to lead the
Niagara movement and
founded the NAACP