In 1865, following the Civil War, southern state legislatures began enacting Black Codes to restrict freedmen's rights and maintain the plantation system. The Republican-controlled Congress responded to these measures by passing the three great postwar constitutional amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth) that abolished slavery, guaranteed the newly freed blacks equal protection of the laws, and gave all male American citizens the right to vote regardless of their "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
As Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, the concept of equal rights collapsed in the wake of legislative and judicial actions. The Civil Rights Cases of 1883 greatly limited the rights of blacks and strengthened Jim Crow laws in the South. In Plessy v.Ferguson,the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the concept of separate but equal public facilities, thus ensuring racial segregation and discrimination, especially in education. Whites would use this concept to keep African Americans, as well as other minorities, in separate and unequal facilities.
The passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments was partly responsible for a rising focus of women's rights activists on the right to vote. Asian, Irish and other immigrant Americans were also restricted from public life, isolated in segregated schools, and discriminated against in regard to employment and housing. They also suffered under bans on racial intermarriage and limitations on real property ownership. Unlike blacks, the Chinese were excluded from immigration after 1882, while many other Asians were limited in the numbers that could legally immigrate, and none were allowed to become citizens. Americans Indians fought the tide of frontier and westward expansion and broken treaty obligations.
The last decades of the nineteenth century were a time when vast and dramatic changes took place throughout America, many of them as a consequence of the Civil War. Urbanization, industrialization, immigration, the ferment of populism and labor struggles, the expansion of education, the settlement of the West and the end of the frontier, and the emergence of women's professions created a more diversified and complicated setting for the equal rights struggle.
*Some content used with permission from Eastern National's Guidebook to The American Civil Rights Experience.
Pivotal Civil Rights Moments in Antebellum America
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- Nicodemus National Historic Site
Nettie Craig Asberry
- Type: Person
- Locations: Nicodemus National Historic Site
Nettie Craig Asberry is considered the first Black woman to earn a doctorate degree. Her family settled in Nicodemus in 1879, and she taught in town from 1886-1889, teaching both at the District No. 1 School and offering private music lessons. Asberry spent most of her life in Tacoma, Washington where she continued to teach music and advocated for the equal rights of all.
- Type: Place
- Locations: Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, National Capital Parks-East
The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site preserves and interprets Cedar Hill, where Frederick Douglass lived from 1877 until his death in 1895.
- Type: Article
- Locations: Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site, Castillo de San Marcos National Monument
In 2018, "Barracoon" by Zora Neale Hurston was published posthumously. This book told the story of Cudjo Lewis a survivor of the "Clotilda", one of the last ships to bring enslaved people from Africa to the United States. In this article learn about Hurston's journey to write this book and Cudjo's story.
- Type: Person
- Locations: Capitol Hill Parks, Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site, Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site, New River Gorge National Park & Preserve
- Offices: National Historic Landmarks Program
Dr. Carter G. Woodson was an American historian who first opened the long-neglected field of African and African American History to scholars and popularized the field in schools and colleges across the United States. In 1915, he established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc. and in 1926, he created "Negro History Week," which later became "Black History Month."
- Independence National Historical Park
The Underground Railroad by William Still, 1872
- Type: Article
- Locations: Independence National Historical Park
In 1872, William Still, an abolitionist, prominent businessman, historian, and former chairman of the Vigilance Committee, published "The Underground Railroad." After the Civil War, Still decided to share the accounts of freedom seeking and bravery completed by some of the nearly 1,000 people he aided in seeking freedom towards the North.
- Type: Article
Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area (FFNHA) is one of several dozen Congressionally designated national heritage areas across the United States. Included within the FFNHA are museums, historical societies, libraries, and other cultural-heritage sites in counties across the Kansas-Missouri border. The heritage area has online tours of regional African American history and supports other African-American history initiatives.
- Type: Article
The Stagville Memorial Project in Durham, North Carolina seeks to bring lesser-known histories about formerly enslaved people at Stagville Plantation and their descendants to wider audiences through history exhibitions, programming, and public art.
- Type: Place
- Locations: Capitol Hill Parks, National Capital Parks-East
On the morning after Lincoln's death in 1865, sixty-year old Charlotte Scott, a former Virginia slave living in Ohio, donated five dollars to her employer and asked that it be used toward a monument for the president. A campaign among freed slaves raised $18,000 for the memorial. Frederick Douglass delivered the keynote speech at the monument's dedication on April 14, 1876, which was attended by President Ulysses S. Grant and other political figures. The Emancipation Monument
- Type: Person
- Locations: Independence National Historical Park, Reconstruction Era National Historical Park
Octavius Catto was a Civil War and Reconstruction era civil rights activist, professional athlete, and civic leader who was assassinated in an act of political violence in 1871.
- Type: Article
This article explores some of the places associated with Malcolm X. Learn about the places where he lived, worked, and preached.
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civil rights reconstruction civil rights act of 1866 civil rights act of 1875 jim crow 14th amendment 13th amendment 15th amendment antebellum plessy v. ferguson little bighorn big hole battlefield chinese exclusion freedmens colony freedmans bureau buffalo soldiers freedmen kalaupapa and kalawao settlements nicodemus frederick douglass
Last updated: April 12, 2016