Students will analyze the ways that a nationwide system of racial control and second-class citizenship was developed after Reconstruction to deny political, social and economic equality to Black people.
Essential Knowledge
1.A. After the Civil War, the federal government helped to institutionalize white supremacy by failing to support the protections offered by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. The U.S. Supreme Court ensured de jure segregation—segregation codified by law—could continue, overturning the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and ruling in favor of “separate but equal” segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson.
1.B. As a response to African Americans gaining political power during Reconstruction, Southern states systematically disenfranchised Black voters by rewriting state constitutions to include a wide range of new legal measures, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, designed to restrict access to the ballot.
1.C. White Southerners passed laws to maintain white social control. Black Codes, or sets of laws passed by former Confederates who regained power starting in 1865, codified certain rights (such as marriage and land ownership) but also guaranteed harsher punishments for people of color accused of the same crimes as white people.
1.D. As the federal government withdrew from Reconstruction promises and ex-Confederates regained power, white Southerners increasingly used violence and fraud to obtain economic power. Unfair labor contracts between landowners and farmers profited white landowners and left Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers in endless cycles of debt and poverty.
1.E. White supremacists used violence to consolidate power. Private citizens and racial terror groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, used lynching as a way to control Black people’s labor and regulate behavior. Without repercussions, the Klan and other groups regularly inflicted violence on those who sought education, political power or economic success for Black people.
1.F. Black philosophers, intellectuals and activists across the nation engaged in public discussion and debate about the best ways to contend with a white supremacist system and create a better future for Black Americans.
1.G. Many of the systems put into place during and after Reconstruction to control Black people and limit Black political and economic power continue into the present day.
Related Resources
For teaching about the failures of Reconstruction, educators can review the following resources:
- LFJ’s Teaching Hard History: A Framework for Teaching American Slavery, particularly Summary Objectives 19, 20 and 21.
- LFJ’s Teaching Hard History podcast, Season 4: The Jim Crow Era offers recommendations and reflections for teaching this critical era, with Episode 4 specifically addressing Reconstruction.
- The Zinn Education Project’s Teach Reconstruction Campaign contains lessons that help students analyze the accomplishments and failures of this time and see the connections between different social movements.
- [1.A.] To analyze how the federal government failed to protect the rights afforded by the Reconstruction Amendments, students can examine the text of the 14th Amendment and contrast it with the 1896 Judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States in Plessy v. Ferguson. Both primary texts are available in the LFJ text library, where they are paired with text-based questions to aid student reading.
- [1.B.] To explore how Southern state legislatures responded to the expansion of voting that enfranchised Black men, students can read the Mississippi Constitution of 1890. Article 12, particularly, illustrates how Southern state legislatures rewrote constitutions to place obstacles in the way of newly enfranchised African Americans.
- [1.C.] Key examples of Black Codes legislation include laws that exploited or regulated the labor of Black people. Vagrancy laws (particularly in Mississippi and South Carolina) allowed magistrates to arrest any Black man who appeared unemployed and hire him out to a white planter. Apprenticeship laws meant that if courts ruled that parents were unable to adequately care for children under 18, those children could be apprenticed out as labor, with preference given to former enslavers. Licensure laws required African Americans to get special licenses to do anything other than farm. These documents are widely available online. “Excerpt from Mississippi Black Codes (1865)” and the lesson “The History of Slave Patrols, Black Codes, and Vagrancy Laws” are available from Facing History & Ourselves.
- [1.C.] During the Jim Crow era, Southern states used peonage and convict labor to force African Americans to work without pay for years or even decades. Watch the PBS documentary Slavery by Another Name to learn more.
- [1.C.] Letters archived by The Freedmen and Southern Society Project capture contemporary protests of unfair laws. In the January 25, 1866, letter “Mississippi Freedman to the Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau Assistant Commissioner,” M. Howard, a freedman in Mississippi, protests labor contracts and Black Codes.
- [1.D.] To learn more about the impact and endurance of the exploitative labor systems established during Reconstruction, analyze the work of photographer Marion Post Wolcott. Her 1939 photograph titled “Negro Farmer Who Has Brought His Cotton Samples to Town Discusses Price With Cotton Buyer” captures the power dynamic between white buyers and African American sharecroppers. This and other Wolcott photographs are available in the online catalog of the Library of Congress.
- [1.D.] To better understand sharecropping and tenant farming, examine a sharecropper contract. These documents are widely available online, or K-12 educators can create a school account for free access to “Sharecropper Contract, 1867” through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
- [1.E.] To teach about the rise of racial terror during Reconstruction and its continued impact today, educators can use the LFJ film An Outrage along with the activities in the film kit.
- [1.E.] Explore current projects to map lynching, including the Equal Justice Initiative’s online map Racial Terror Lynchings.
- [1.E.] The short film The Origins of Lynching Culture in the United States, available from Facing History & Ourselves, can provide further important context for this era.
- [1.E.] The Ku Klux Klan is the most notorious white supremacy group in the United States. To see how the Klan’s views were disseminated through mainstream means in the 1920s, students can review issues of The Fiery Cross, a propaganda outlet published by the Klan masquerading under the guise of a legitimate newspaper, available online through the libraries of Indiana University.
- [1.E.] Throughout this period, Black journalists worked to document lynchings. To better understand the scope and impact of racial terror, as well as how these Black writers and activists risked their lives to document it, students can read “I Investigate Lynchings,” a 1929 essay by activist Walter White from his time as an undercover journalist in Georgia, available through the LFJ text library.
- [1.E.] Students should also explore the career of journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The Digital Public Library of America’s collection Ida B. Wells and Anti-Lynching Activism offers a useful starting point.
- [1.E.] For more on the history of racial terror and recommendations for teaching this era, educators can listen to the LFJ Teaching Hard History podcast, specifically Season 4, Episode 6, “Lynching: White Supremacy, Terrorism and Black Resilience,” and Season 3, Episode 4, “Jim Crow, Lynching and White Supremacy.”
- [1.F.] To understand the ways Black activists engaged in the freedom struggle throughout the United States, explore the works of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Students should analyze the former’s 1895 “Atlanta Compromise,” comparing the ways Washington engaged with white politicians with Du Bois’ 1905 “Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles,” which signaled a new era of civil rights activism led by Black intellectuals.
- [1.F.] Analyze the ways Black women theorized and organized to address both white supremacy and patriarchy. LFJ’s lesson on “Mary Church Terrell” introduces students to the first president of the National Association of Colored Women and asks them to analyze part of one of her addresses.
- [1.F.] Scholar Anna Julia Cooper is another important figure with whom students should be acquainted. Her 1893 speech “Women’s Cause Is One and Universal” is available through BlackPast.
- [1.G.] To better understand the philosophy that would later inspire Black Power and Black nationalist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, students can watch the short video “Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” available through NBC News Learn or the LFJ text library.
- [1.G.] To connect contemporary injustices in the criminal justice system to both slavery and the Reconstruction era, educators can use the lesson “Examining the Legacy of Slavery in Mass Incarceration,” from the Pulitzer Center’s The 1619 Project Curriculum.
- [1.G.] LFJ’s Teaching Hard History podcast, Season 4, Episode 15, “Criminalizing Blackness: Prisons, Police and Jim Crow,” also explores this topic.
- [1.G.] The systems established under Reconstruction continued to disenfranchise Black voters for generations. Reviewing a sample of an Alabama literacy test shows how, as late as 1965, local registrars could choose harder questions for people they didn’t want to pass the test and could even choose to interpret correct answers as incorrect.
- [1.G.] To connect the strategies used to limit Black people’s political power after the Civil War with voter suppression today, students can read a passage from Carol Anderson’s One Person, No Vote. The LFJ resource “Teach This: Voter Suppression and Literacy Tests” includes an excerpt of the text adapted for young adult readers, along with discussion questions.
- [1.G.] For more recent examples of voter suppression, the LFJ resource “Teach This: Texas Students Fight for Their Right To Vote” outlines ways students at one HBCU have struggled for over 40 years to maintain their access to the ballot.
