Presidents

• Andrew Johnson took office in 1865 and aimed at a return to normality. He was sympathetic to the Southern states, giving them the confidence to pass Black Codes.
• Under Andrew Johnson, once southerners had sworn an oath of loyalty to the Union, they could elect state assemblies which would ratify the Thirteenth Amendment.
• Hayes Compromise 1877 - South Carolina and Louisiana would vote for Hayes if the states were given greater agency.
• Some presidents, like the otherwise progressive Woodrow Wilson(1913-21) believed in white supremacy.
• FDR’s New Deal didn’t cover agriculture or domestic service, meaning many black people were excluded.
• Eisenhower was against ending ‘separate but equal’, but he did enforce the desegregation of schools.
• Even conservative southerner Truman was bitterly criticised by democrats for expressing concerns about civil rights and condemning lynching and violence.
• The Kennedy administration saw itself as modernising, but he was slow to make civil rights the key element in his admin.
• The liberalisation involved in civil rights legislation opened administrations to the charge of being communist in the Cold War era.
• President Grant was prepared to suspend habeus corpus and use federal troops in South Carolina in 1871 against the violence caused by the Klan.