The south after the civil war

The South after the civil war

After Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870 providing the right to vote, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 forbidding racial segregation in accommodations, Federal occupation troops in the South assured blacks the right to vote and to elect their own political leaders. The Reconstruction amendments asserted the supremacy of the national state and the formal equality under the law of everyone within it. However this radical Reconstruction era would collapse because of multidimensional racialism related to the spread of democratic idealism. What began as region wide passage of ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws that focused on issues of equal access to public activities and facilities would by 1910 have spread throughout the south, mandating the segregation of whites and blacks in the public sphere.

After the end of Reconstruction, which followed from the Compromise of 1877, the new Democratic governments in the South instituted state laws to separate black and white racial groups, submitting African-Americans to a second-class citizenship and enforcing white supremacy. Collectively, these state laws were called the Jim Crow system, after the name of a stereotypical 1830s black minstrel show character.

After the Civil War, it took over 100 years for blacks to have the same equal rights as whites. Three amendments to the U.S. Constitution helped blacks have the same opportunities as whites and have the same right to vote. The Reconstruction Acts were also part of this fight. These made the South give blacks their political rights.

As part of Reconstruction, two new amendments were added to the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment passed in June 1865, granted citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in February of 1869, guaranteed that no American would be denied the right to vote on the basis of race. For many African Americans, however, this right would be short-lived. Following Reconstruction, they would be denied their legal right to vote in many states until the Voting Rights Act of 1965

By Bjørn, Domantas, Liban, Martin, Tsvetana & Karen-Marie