Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement

Model for reinstatement of Southern states. It decreed that a state could be reintegrated into the Union when 10% of the 1860 vote count from that state had taken an oath of allegiance to the U.S. and pledged to abide by emancipation. Voters could then elect delegates to draft revised state constitutions and establish new state governments. All southerners except for high-ranking Confederate army officers and government officials would be granted a full pardon. Lincoln guaranteed southerners that he would protect their private property, though not their slaves. By 1864, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas had established fully functioning Unionist governments. This policy was meant to shorten the war by offering a moderate peace plan. It was also intended to further his emancipation policy by insisting that the new governments abolished slavery. Was met with opposition by Radical Republicans, who thought it was too lenient to the South.

Faction of American politicians within the Republican Party from until the end of Reconstruction in 1877. They strongly opposed slavery during the war and after the war distrusted ex-Confederates, demanding harsh policies for the former rebels, and emphasizing civil rights and voting rights for freedmen (recently freed slaves). They initiated the Reconstruction Acts, and limited political and voting rights for ex-Confederates. They bitterly fought President Andrew Johnson; weakened his powers and attempted to remove him from office through impeachment (they were one vote short). They were vigorously opposed by the Democratic Party and often by moderate and Liberal Republicans as well.

Senator from Massachusetts. An academic lawyer and a powerful orator who was the leader of the antislavery forces in Massachusetts and a leader of the Radical Republicans in the United States Senate during the American Civil War working to destroy the Confederacy, free all the slaves and keep on good terms with Europe. During Reconstruction, he fought to minimize the power of the ex-Confederates and guarantee equal rights to the Freedmen.

Member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania and one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party during the 1860s. A fierce opponent of slavery and discrimination against African-Americans, he sought to secure their rights during Reconstruction, in opposition to President Andrew Johnson. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee during the American Civil War, he played a major part in the war's financing.

Bill proposed for the Reconstruction of the South written by two Radical Republicans, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland. It made re-admittance to the Union for former Confederate states contingent on a majority in each Southern state to take the Ironclad oath to the effect they had never in the past supported the Confederacy. The bill passed both houses of Congress on July 2, 1864, but was pocket vetoed by Lincoln and never took effect. The Radical Republicans were outraged that Lincoln did not sign the bill. Lincoln wanted to mend the Union by carrying out the Ten percent plan. He believed it would be too difficult to repair all of the ties within the Union if the Radical Plan passed.

A legislative maneuver in lawmaking that allows a president effectively to veto a bill by taking no action. If ten days have passed after Congress has presented a bill to the president and Congress is adjourned, the bill does not become law and cannot be overridden by Congress. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln used this power to veto the Wade-Davis Bill.

United States President Abraham Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, as the American Civil War was drawing to a close. The assassination occurred five days after the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, General Robert E. Lee, surrendered to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant and the Union Army of the Potomac. Lincoln was the first American president to be assassinated. The assassination of Lincoln was planned and carried out by the well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth, as part of a larger conspiracy in a bid to revive the Confederate cause. Booth's co-conspirators were Lewis Powell and David Herold, who were assigned to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward, and George Atzerodt who was to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson. By simultaneously eliminating the top three people in the administration, Booth and his co-conspirators hoped to sever the continuity of the United States government. Lincoln was shot while watching the play Our American Cousin with his wife Mary Todd Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.. He died early the next morning. The rest of the conspirators' plot failed; Powell only managed to wound Seward, while Atzerodt, Johnson's would-be assassin, lost his nerve and fled Washington.

Famous American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. He was a Confederate sympathizer, vehement in his denunciation of Lincoln, and strongly opposed the abolition of slavery in the United States. Following the assassination, he fled on horseback to southern Maryland, eventually making his way to a farm in rural northern Virginia 12 days later, where he was tracked down. His companion gave himself up, but he refused and was shot by a Union soldier after the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze. Eight other conspirators or suspects were tried and convicted, and four were hanged shortly thereafter.

17th President of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. He became president as Abraham Lincoln's vice president at the time of Lincoln's assassination. A Democrat who ran with Lincoln on the National Union ticket, he came to office as the Civil War concluded. The new president favored quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union, like Lincoln, yet was ill-suited for the delicate negotiations and compromises that would be necessary to maintain the Republican coalition. He was also openly-hostile to blacks and believed in white supremacy. His plans did not give protection to the former slaves, and he came into conflict with the Republican-dominated Congress, culminating in his impeachment by the House of Representatives. The first American president to be impeached, he was acquitted in the Senate by one vote.

Johnson's plan for Reconstruction consisted of several parts. He directed former Confederate states to draft new constitutions revoking their ordinances of secession, repudiating Confederate debt, and ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment. He also took a lenient approach to former rebels. He offered \"amnesty and pardon, with restoration of all rights of property\" to almost all southerners who took an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the Union. By October 1865, ten of the eleven rebel states claimed to have passed Johnson's test for readmission into the Union.

An oath that must be taken by all immigrants who wish to become United States citizens.

Also known as the Reconstruction Amendments, which were adopted between 1865 and 1870. Their proponents saw them as transforming the United States from a country that was \"half slave and half free\" to one in which the constitutionally guaranteed \"blessings of liberty\" would be extended to the entire populace, including the former slaves and their descendants. The Thirteenth Amendment (proposed and ratified in 1865) abolished slavery.The Fourteenth Amendment (proposed in 1866 and ratified in 1868) included the privileges and immunities clause, applicable to all citizens, and the due process and equal protection clauses applicable to all persons. The Fifteenth Amendment, (proposed in 1869 and ratified in 1870) prohibits discrimination in voting rights of citizens on the basis of \"race, color, or previous condition of servitude.\"

Laws passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War. These laws had the intent and the effect of restricting African Americans' freedom, and of compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt.

Also known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. It was a U.S. federal government agency that aided distressed freedmen (freed slaves) during the Reconstruction era of the United States, though by 1870 it had been considerably weakened.

A United States federal law that was mainly intended to protect the civil rights of African-Americans, in the wake of the American Civil War. The Act was enacted by Congress in 1865 but vetoed by President Andrew Johnson. In April 1866 Congress again passed the bill. Although Johnson again vetoed it, a two-thirds majority in each house overcame the veto and the bill became law.

Johnson's extensive use of the veto and a confrontational policy against Congress, especially the Radical Republicans, spurred a general disdain of him. Although he had predicted that his actions would cause conflict between the radicals and the moderates, both factions instead joined together in their antagonism of Johnson.

American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator and lawyer.

Act which reversed presidential restoration and established new requirements for southern states to gain entry into the Union. It declared that \"no legal government\" existed in the South. It divided the South into five military districts, each under the command of a Union general. To be considered reconstructed, the law required southern states to call new constitutional conventions in which all male citizens were eligible to vote. Finally, all the newly-elected legislatures would have to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. During 1868, six states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas) were readmitted.

The 15th Amendment was passed to safeguard black votes. It forbade states to deny their citizens the right to vote on the grounds of \"race, color, or previous condition of servitude.\" The amendment posed a polemic situation on the issue of women's suffrage. During the war, suffragists had temporarily abandoned their cause in order to support the war effort yet at the war's end, when they refocused their attention to suffrage, they found that many former political allies had abandoned their cause. Republicans thought male black votes were the key to gaining control of the southern states. Meanwhile, former abolitionists who had supported the women's cause thought that asking for women's suffrage at the same time would distract attention from the most important issue. Instead of supporting their former allies, Republicans sanctioned the denial of suffrage. Disappointed feminists accepted defeat at the federal level and focused on reform in state constitutions. Angry with their former allies, Stanton and Anthony campaigned against ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Ratification would create an \"aristocracy of sex.\" They employed racist and elitist arguments in opposing the new amendment. They formed the all-female National Woman Suffrage Association. Another group of feminists led by Lucy Stone conceded that this was the \"Negro's hour\" and accepted the Fifteenth Amendment. They formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) on a moderate basis.

A United States federal law (in force from 1867 to 1887) that was intended to restrict the power of the President of the United States to remove certain office-holders without the approval of the Senate. The law was enacted on March 3, 1867, over the veto of President Andrew Johnson. It purported to deny the president the power to remove any executive officer who had been appointed by the president, without the advice and consent of the Senate, unless the Senate approved the removal during the next full session of Congress. Congress repealed the act in its entirety in 1887.

Johnson was impeached on February 24, 1868, in the U.S. House of Representatives on eleven articles of impeachment detailing his \"high crimes and misdemeanors\",[1] in accordance with Article Two of the United States Constitution. The House's primary charge against Johnson was with violation of the Tenure of Office Act, passed by Congress the previous year. Specifically, he had removed Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War (whom the Tenure of Office Act was largely designed to protect), from office and replaced him with Union General Ulysses S. Grant. The House agreed to the articles of impeachment on March 2, 1868. The trial began three days later in the Senate, with Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding. The trial concluded on May 16 with Johnson's acquittal, with the votes for conviction being one less than the required two-thirds tally. The moderates agreed that Johnson had broken the law, but they believed the violation did not warrant removal from office, fearing such a move would establish a dangerous precedent and weaken the presidency.

Derogatory term used by southern Democrats to refer to poor white southerners who joined the Republican side during Reconstruction. They resented the planter elite and thought that Republican policies would favor them over the wealthy landowners. They included southern Unionists, small town merchants, and rural farmers.

A pejorative term that Southerners used to address Republican office seekers from the North who moved South. They took advantage of the new black franchise, which now dominated southern political atmosphere. Most combined a desire for personal gain with a commitment to reform the South by introducing northern ideas and institutions. They made up only a sixth of the delegates to state conventions, but held more than half of the Republican governorships in the South and almost half its seats in Congress.

The name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically expressed through terrorism. The first organization flourished in the Southern United States in the late 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s (due to pressure from president Grant). Members adopted white costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide their identities.

In 1870, he became the first African-American member of the US Senate.

According to black Baptist minister, Henry M. Turner, freedom meant \"the enjoyment of our rights in common with other men.\" Freedmen acquired belongings (such as dogs, guns, and liquor) that had been forbidden to them under slavery and abandoned the old expressions of humility (tipping a hat, stepping aside, casting eyes low). They dressed as they pleased; with the freedom to travel, many left the plantation. African Americans pooled their resources to buy land and build their own churches. These churches and the ministers who led them played. Key roles in the social, political, and religious lives of the parishioners. For many African Americans, economic independence was the most powerful expression of freedom.

A highly prominent form of tenant farming that was present in the American South during the Reconstruction Era. Under this scheme, former plantation owners subdivided their land into farms of 30 to 50 acres, which they leased to workers. The tenants were given seed, fertilizer, farm implements, and food and clothing to take care of their families and grow a cash crop, usually cotton. In return, the tenant took a share of the crop. At first, freed people were enthusiastic, since they perceived the system as a first step towards independence. Rather than being a step towards independence, however, it trapped many African-Americans in a new system of labor that was neither slave nor free. Sharecroppers turned to local merchants for credit. The merchants, who were also often the landowners, advanced loans to sharecroppers in exchange for a claim on the year's crop. As the only available creditors, merchants and planters could charge usurious mark-up prices. With half their crop owed to the merchant and another half owed to the merchant, sharecroppers fell into debt they could not escape.

An agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management; while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying amounts of capital and management. Depending on the contract, tenants can make payments to the owner either of a fixed portion of the product, in cash or in a combination. The rights the tenant has over the land, the form, and measure of the payment varies across systems (geographically and chronologically). In some systems, the tenant could be evicted at whim (tenancy at will); in others, the landowner and tenant sign a contract for a fixed number of years (tenancy for years or indenture).

A person's pledge of their labor or services as repayment for a debt or other obligation. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined. This occurred to many black tenant farmers who experienced debt during the 1870s, who essentially remained slaves for as long as the duration of their lives.

The United States presidential election of 1868 was the 21st quadrennial presidential election. As three of the former Confederate states (Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia) were not yet restored to the Union, their electors could not vote in the election. The incumbent President, Andrew Johnson was unsuccessful in his attempt to receive a Democratic presidential nomination due to his unpopularity. After numerous ballots, the Democrats nominated Horatio Seymour to take on the Republican candidate, Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was one of the most popular men in the country due to his efforts in concluding the Civil War successfully for the Union. Although Seymour was buried in the electoral college (214 to 80 electoral votes), he gave Grant a good race for the popular vote (3,013,421 to 2,706,829), especially considering the temporary advantages that Grant could draw upon, being a Radical. In addition to his appeal in the North, Grant benefited from votes among the newly enfranchised freedmen in the South. It was also the first election in which African Americans could vote (in accordance with the First Reconstruction Act) in every (Northern or Reconstructed) state; Grant won office thanks to the black vote, which numbered above 700,000. This would make Grant the first President to be elected with a minority of the white vote. The United States presidential election of 1872 was the 22nd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 5, 1872. The incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant was easily elected to a second term in office, with Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts as his running mate, despite a split within the Republican Party that resulted in a defection of many Liberal Republicans to opponent Horace Greeley of the Democratic Party, which also nominated the candidates of the Liberal Republican ticket that year. On November 29, 1872, after the popular vote, but before the Electoral College cast its votes, Greeley died. As a result, electors previously committed to Greeley voted for four different candidates for president, and eight different candidates for vice-president. Greeley himself received three posthumous electoral votes, but these votes were disallowed by Congress. The election was the first in which every competing state used a popular vote to determine its electors; since 1832, South Carolina had been the lone state to decide electors by the state legislature. Florida's legislature had decided its electors in 1868. Also, it is so far the only election in which a presidential candidate died during the electoral process.

18th president of the United States (1869-1877) following his success as military commander in the American Civil War. His success on the battlefield did not translate to effectiveness in the White House. He appointed greedy men who could not resist the temptation of personal gain. These \"spoilsmen\" tainted his administration with scandals, such as the Credit Mobilier scandal, the \"salary grab,\" and the Whiskey Ring. His second term was dominated by the \"money question.\" To help finance the Civil War, Congress had issued almost $450 million in greenbacks. The president proposed to call in greenbacks with payments of gold and silver, which would help creditors but hurt debtors. The president's call for hard money could not have come at a worse time. In 1873, the bankruptcy of the Northern Pacific Railroad set off the \"Panic of 1873,\" a steep economic depression that lasted for six years. By 1876, eighteen thousand businesses were bankrupt and 15 percent of the labor force was unemployed. Many people believed his tight money policy had been burdensome to the people and had contributed to the depression. One of his greatest successes, however, was the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan.

Bringing up a past injustice or mistreatment in history to justify or cover up an injustice being committed in the present. Liberal Republicans criticized party spoilsmen of doing this by using the \"southern question\" as a distraction from more important issues: civil service reform and effective government.

An American newspaper editor, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer, a politician, and an outspoken opponent of slavery. The New York Tribune (which he founded and edited) was the US' most influential newspaper from the 1840s to the 1870s and \"established Greeley's reputation as the greatest editor of his day.\" Greeley used it to promote the Whig and Republican parties, as well as opposition to slavery and a host of reforms ranging from vegetarianism to socialism. Crusading against the corruption of Ulysses S. Grant's Republican administration, he was the new Liberal Republican Party's candidate in the 1872 U.S. presidential election. Despite having the additional support of the Democratic Party, he lost in a landslide. He is the only presidential candidate to have died prior to the counting of electoral votes.

The defeat of Radical Republicans by white Democrats, marking the end of the Reconstruction era in the South. The movement's appeal rested on the South's social and cultural foundation of racism and white supremacy.

Federal law that allowed Confederate leaders to vote and to hold public office.

Law passed in the closing hours of the Republican-controlled Congress. It guaranteed persons of every race \"the full and equal treatment\" of all public facilities such as hotels, theaters, and railroads.

Several Supreme Court decisions on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that undermined protection of black rights. The Court offered a narrow definition of the Fourteenth Amendment by distinguishing between national and state citizenship. By giving the states primary authority over citizens' rights, the courts weakened civil rights enforcement. In 1876 the Court decided, in United States v. Cruikshank, that a mob attack on blacks trying to vote did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1883, the Court reaffirmed its limited view if the Constitution in United States v. Harris, which argued that the lynching of four black prisoners did not represent an infringement of their Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The 23rd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 7, 1876. It was one of the most contentious and controversial presidential elections in American history. The results of the election remain among the most disputed ever, although there is no question that Samuel J. Tilden of New York outpolled Ohio's Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote. After a first count of votes, it was clear that Tilden had won 184 electoral votes to Hayes's 165, with 20 votes unresolved. These 20 electoral votes were in dispute in four states: in the case of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, each party reported its candidate had won the state, while in Oregon one elector was declared illegal (as an \"elected or appointed official\") and replaced. The question of who should have been awarded these electoral votes is the source of the continued controversy concerning the results of this election. An informal deal was struck to resolve the dispute: the Compromise of 1877, which awarded all 20 electoral votes to Hayes. In return for the Democrats' acquiescence in Hayes's election, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. The Compromise effectively ceded power in the Southern states to the Democratic Redeemers. This was the first presidential election in 20 years in which the Democratic candidate won a majority of the popular vote. This is also the only election in which a candidate for president received more than 50 percent of the popular vote but was not elected president by the Electoral College, and one of four elections in which the person receiving the largest proportion of the popular vote lost the election. It is to date the smallest electoral vote victory in American history.

The 25th Governor of New York and the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Presidency in the disputed election of 1876, one of the most controversial and closest American elections of the 19th century. A political reformer, he was a Bourbon Democrat who worked closely with the New York City business community and led the fight against the corruption of Tammany Hall.

The 19th President of the United States (1877-1881). As president, he oversaw the end of Reconstruction, began the efforts that led to civil service reform, and attempted to reconcile the divisions left over from the Civil War and Reconstruction. He served in the U.S. Congress from 1865 to 1867 as a Republican. He left Congress to run for Governor of Ohio and was elected to two consecutive terms, from 1868 to 1872, and then to a third term, from 1876 to 1877. In 1876, he was elected president in one of the most contentious and confused elections in national history. He lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden but he won an intensely disputed electoral college vote after a Congressional commission awarded him twenty contested electoral votes. He believed in meritocratic government, equal treatment without regard to race, and improvement through education. He ordered federal troops to quell the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. He implemented modest civil service reforms that laid the groundwork for further reform in the 1880s and 1890s. He vetoed the Bland-Allison Act that would have put silver money into circulation and raised prices, insisting that maintenance of the gold standard was essential to economic recovery. His policy toward Western Indians anticipated the assimilationist program of the Dawes Act of 1887. He kept his pledge not to run for re-election. Possibly his greatest achievement was to restore popular faith in the presidency and to reverse the deterioration of executive power that had set in after Lincoln's death.

A purported informal, unwritten deal that settled the intensely disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election, pulled federal troops out of state politics in the South, and ended the Reconstruction Era. Through the Compromise, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden on the understanding that Hayes would remove the federal troops whose support was essential for the survival of Republican state governments in South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. The compromise involved Democrats who controlled the House of Representatives allowing the decision of the Electoral Commission to take effect. The outgoing president, Republican Ulysses S. Grant, removed the soldiers from Florida. As president, Hayes removed the remaining troops in South Carolina and Louisiana. As soon as the troops left, many white Republicans also left and the \"Redeemer\" Democrats took control. What exactly happened is somewhat contested as the documentation is scanty. African American historians sometimes call it \"The Great Betrayal.\"

The idea of transforming the South into a bustling center of commerce and industry, while abandoning its old agrarian ways. Despite the development of new factories and a few large cities, southern society, steeped in white supremacy, remained economically dependent on cheap labor and king cotton.

The crop-lien system was a credit system that became widely used by cotton farmers in the United States in the South from the 1860s to the 1930s. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers who did not own the land they worked obtained supplies and food on credit from local merchants. Merchants held a lien on the cotton crop and the merchants and landowners were the first ones paid from its sale. What was left over went to the farmer. The system ended in the 1940s as prosperity returned and many poor farmers moved permanently to cities and towns, where jobs were plentiful because of the war.

An American literary and cultural movement that sought to reconcile the traditional white society of the U.S. South to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War of 1861-1865. Those who contributed to the movement tended to portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and most of its leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies through overwhelming force rather than martial skill. Proponents of the movement also condemned even the only-partial Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to destroy the traditional Southern way of life.

Racial segregation laws enacted between 1876 and 1965 in the United States at the state and local level. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with, starting in 1890, a \"separate but equal\" status for African Americans. The separation in practice led to conditions for African Americans that tended to be inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. While Northern segregation was generally de facto, there were patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades. Some examples are the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated. State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Generally, the remaining segregation laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

All former Confederate states changed their constitutions to provide for methods to exclude the black vote. Such methods included the poll tax, literacy tests, and the \"grandfather clause.\"

Method of disenfranchisement of African Americans that was used by states such as Mississippi. Its constitution of 1890 required a poll tax of $2 from prospective voters at registration. Men who intended to vote at elections had to present their receipt at the polls. Anyone who mislaid his receipt forfeited his vote.

Method by which some states enforced the disenfranchisement of blacks. Literacy tests required prospective voters to \"be able to read and understand the Constitution when read.\" Since white Democratic registrars interpreted the ability to read or understand, officials could use ordinances to discriminate in favor of poor illiterate whites and against black citizens, literate or not.

Legislation adopted by several southern states, such as Louisiana in the late nineteenth century. The law limited the franchise to anyone who had a grandfather in the electoral roll in 1867. Since grandfathers of most blacks had been slaves, and unable to vote, the measure effectively barred them from voting.

The provision for separate facilities, such as schools, hospitals, parks, restaurants, hotels, courthouses, and other public places for African Americans and whites.

A landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of \"separate but equal\". The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1 with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. \"Separate but equal\" remained standard doctrine in U.S. law until its repudiation in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. After the Supreme Court ruling, the New Orleans Committee of Citizens, which had brought the suit and arranged for Homer Plessy's arrest in order to challenge Louisiana's segregation law, replied, \"We, as freemen, still believe that we were right and our cause is sacred.\"

Murder by mob, often by hanging, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a specific sector of a population. It has resulted from long-held prejudices and practices of discrimination that have conditioned societies to accept this type of violence as normal practices of popular justice. These types of attacks on U.S. blacks, especially in the South, increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Civil War, after slavery had been abolished and recently freed black men gained the right to vote. Violence rose even more at the end of the 19th century, after southern white Democrats regained their political power in the South in the 1870s. Nearly 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were victims in the United States between 1882 and 1968, mostly from 1882 to 1920.

African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, he was a dominant leader in the African-American community. Born in 1856 to a slave woman and her white master, whose identity he never knew, he later attended the Hampton Institute in Virginia, a black school established and run by northern whites. In 1881 he helped organize the Tuskegee Institute, a state vocational school for blacks. He gained national prominence in 1895 when white organizers invited him to speak at Atlanta's Cotton States and International Exposition, the first time in history that a black man had been asked to address whites at such an important event. He delivered a famous speech, titled the \"Atlanta Compromise.\"

Famous speech given by Booker T. Washington at Atlanta's Cotton Stats International Exposition. It suggested that African-Americans trade political activity and integration for black economic progress. Blacks, he told his segregated audience, should put aside their ambitions for political and social equality and instead focus on developing useful vocational skills. \"It is at the bottom of life we must begin, not at the top.\" Political and social equality would soon follow once blacks had proven their economic value. To both races, he advised cooperation and mutual respect, Washington's message of accommodation was almost universally popular with whites. Southern blacks who favored gradual non confrontational change embraced his philosophy, but some northern black leaders complained that Washington had compromised too much.

An American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After graduating from Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. He was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. He rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. He and his supporters opposed the Atlanta Compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, he insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the talented tenth and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership. Racism was the main target of his polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included colored persons everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in their struggles against colonialism and imperialism. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to free African colonies from European powers. He made several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread bigotry in the United States military. He was also a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, was a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus Black Reconstruction in America challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era. He wrote the first scientific treatise in the field of sociology; and he published three autobiographies, each of which contains insightful essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal The Crisis, he published many influential pieces. He believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States' Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which he had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.