Civil rights

• Thirteenth Amendment


  • Ended slavery in the USA
• Fourteenth Amendment


  • Provided equal protection under the law for all citizens
  • Extended right to due process of law to the individual states
• Fifteenth Amendment


  • Guaranteed right to vote to all citizens irrespective of race, colour or previous condition of servitude (slavery)
• White supremacists


  Whites who believe that the white race was superior to all other races, and regard African Americans as biologically and intellectually inferior
• Radical Republican


  Member of the Republican Party, more than likely in Congress, who wanted to bring about fundamental change in the Southern states following the Civil War. Responsible for the impeachment of President Johnson in 1968.
• Although African Americans faced the most severe discrimination in the Old South, it did not mean that there was racial tolerance elsewhere
• White opposition to civil and political equality for African Americans is a major theme in the history of civil rights in America. Even though the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the changed status of African Americans was accepted with extreme reluctance.
• The black codes of 1865-66, and the formation of vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, were ways in which Southern Whites attempted to maintain their superiority in politics and society.
• By 1876, Radical Republican governments existed in only three Southern states: South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. In spite of restrictions placed on former officials of the Confederacy in the Fourteenth Amendment, white supremacist governments were already appearing.
• Taken together, these actions show that northern politicians and the Supreme Court had abandoned African Americans to their own devices before 1877.
• Beginning in Florida, in 1887, laws were passed which created legal segregation of the races. Similar laws followed in other southern states.
• Examples of Jim Crow laws across the USA

  • Alabama
  • Florida
  • Georgia
  • Louisiana
  • Mississippi
  • North Carolina
• Jim Crow laws


  Laws that created a segregated society not dissimilar to apartheid in South Africa which existed from 1948 to the early 1990s
• In introducing Jim Crow laws, the southern states were accused of violating the civil rights of African Americans under the Fourteenth Amendment.
• However, in a number of Supreme Court cases, the highest legal authority in the USA upheld these developments.
• In 1883, in three civil rights cases, the Court threw out the 1875 Civil Rights Act on the grounds that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to governments not individuals.
• In 1896, in the 'Plessy versus Ferguson' case, the Court declared that Louisiana had not violated the Fourteenth Amendment because it had created 'separate but equal' facilities for the races.
• These cases laid the foundation for legalised segregation, which lasted until the 1950s and 1960s.
• African Americans were also denied voting rights which had been guaranteed under the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870.
• In 1890, Mississippi became the first state to impose new voting qualifications which had the effect of taking the vote away from most African Americans in that state.
• These voting restrictions included literacy tests, residential qualifications, and poll taxes which disenfranchised poor whites as well as large numbers of African Americans.
• In 1898, in 'Mississippi versus Williams', the US Supreme Court upheld these new voting regulations.
• Later, states such as Louisiana, introduced the 'grandfather clause' into voting regulations, which excluded the vast majority of African Americans, whose grandfathers had been slaves.
• Texas also introduced the 'whites only' primary election, which effectively removed African Americans from the political system.
• The effect of these new regulations on African-American voter registration was dramatic. In Louisiana, for example, there were over 130,000 African Americans registered to vote in 1896, but this fell to just 5,300 by 1900.
• To reinforce legal segregation and disenfranchisement, whites also engaged in the use of terror. Between 1890 and 1899, 187 African Americans were lynched on average each year, and between 1887 and 1917, a total of 2,734 African Americans were lynched.
• There were also outbreaks of serious race riots, such as in 1917 in East St Louis, Illinois, where African Americans were murdered by white mobs.
• By 1919, the position of African Americans in the Old South had changed little since the end of the Civil War. In political and civil rights, they faced legal segregation, violence and intimidation.
• The re-founding of the Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1915 by William Simmons exemplified the violence and intimidation faced by African Americans.
• In social terms, most southern African Americans lived in poverty, working as sharecroppers or in menial, low-paid jobs.
• Outside the Old South, the plight of African Americans was only slightly better, as Jim Crow laws also existed in states such as Oklahoma and Kansas.
• African Americans who lived in northern cities such as Chicago and New York faced unofficial segregation in jobs, housing, and schooling.
• The inferior position of African Americans was reinforced by academic views about racial superiority, with some attempting to use biological science to prove African-American inferiority.
• Following the ratification in 1870 of the 15th Amendment, which barred states from depriving citizens the right to vote based on race, southern states began enacting measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries, felony disenfranchisement laws, grandfather clauses, fraud and intimidation to keep African Americans from the polls
• Mississippi's Jim Crow-era laws then set a precedent for other southern states to use the same tactics to assault Black enfranchisement for nearly a century until the passage of the Voting Rights of 1965
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed most discriminatory voting practices in southern states such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses that had been designed by southern legislatures to suppress the African American vote
• Introduced with the Jim Crow laws, literacy tests were used as an effective tool for disenfranchising African Americans in the Southern United States. Literacy tests were typically administered by white clerks who could pass or fail a person at their discretion based on race. Illiterate whites were often permitted to vote without taking these literacy tests because of grandfather clauses written into legislation.
• Grandfather Clause - A provision in some state constitutions which allowed illiterate white men to vote if their fathers or grandfathers voted prior to January 1, 1867. This clause was intended to allow poor whites to vote while excluding blacks.
• Poll Taxes were another method used to prevent African Americans from voting. Poll taxes were fees levied against those wishing to register to vote. These fees were usually set high enough so that only wealthy individuals could afford them. In many cases, poor whites were exempted from paying this fee through grandfather clauses written into state constitutions.
• Civil Rights movement

  Movement that grew out of discontent at the end of World War Two among Black American soldiers who returned home to find racism still existed