- [Voiceover] In the last video we were talking about
the era of reconstruction
and how after the Civil War
when the 13th Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery
many Southern states enacted laws known as black codes,
which in many cases were really just
slavery by another name.
They prevented African Americans from voting,
from owning firearms,
from not being in some kind of labor contract,
or they might be enslaved or jailed for vagrancy
and the North, controlled by a republican Congress,
was outraged by these codes
having just fought an incredibly destructive war
to end slavery.
In response to the black codes,
Congress passed the 14th Amendment to the Constitution
and the 14th Amendment...
guaranteed that anyone born in the United States,
regardless of previous condition of servitude,
had full citizenship,
meaning they're entitled to all the rights
and privileges of being a citizen,
and equal protection under the law.
So a law could not target someone
on the basis of their race.
Now to enforce the 14th Amendment,
Congress sent federal troops to the states in the South,
divided the Southern region up into military zones
and said that the South would be occupied by federal troops
until the states rewrote their constitutions
to recognize the 14th Amendment,
in effect to give equal citizenship to African Americans.
In fact they also passed the 15th Amendment
two years later in 1870,
which said voting rights
are included among these citizenship rights
guaranteed in the 14th Amendment.
I should mention that these voting rights
were only for African American men
as women will not get the right to vote until 1920.
So from the 14th Amendment until 1877
there's a military occupation in the South
and military troops are only taken away
from the Southern states when they write their constitutions
to grant equal citizenship to African Americans.
Now you can imagine in the South
where whites have had racial supremacy from the 1600s,
getting them to recognize social equality
with African Americans was an incredible struggle
and it was a struggle that the republicans in Congress
and the federal troops really didn't win.
This is the era of the Ku Klux Klan,
which ran terrorist raids at night
trying to prevent African Americans from voting
or to prevent their allies from helping them to vote.
This era of reconstruction was really a continuation
of the Civil War where troops from the North
tried to enforce the 14th Amendment,
tried to enforce the end of slavery
and the citizenship of African Americans
with really implacable resistance from white Southerners.
So by 1877, only two states were left
that still had troops 'cause the rest of the states
had rewritten their constitutions
to acknowledge the 14th Amendment.
But that is not to say that racial equality
had been achieved in the South whatsoever.
So what happened in 1877?
Which is generally known as the end of reconstruction
and the beginning of this period of Jim Crow segregation.
Well we'll get to that in the next video.