3.4 - The Defeat of Reconstruction
How Reconstruction Came Apart
Reconstruction didn't end on a single day. It was taken apart piece by piece, and one of the biggest turning points was the presidential election of 1876. Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote, but 20 electoral votes were disputed, most of them from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, the last three Southern states still under Republican control. A special Electoral Commission awarded every disputed vote to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who won the presidency by a single electoral vote, 185 to 184.
Southern Democrats accepted Hayes as president through an informal deal known as the Compromise of 1877. In exchange, Hayes withdrew the federal troops that had been protecting the last Republican state governments in the South. Without that protection, those governments collapsed, and white Southern Democrats, who called themselves "Redeemers," took full control of Southern state politics.
The federal courts were pulling back too. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875's ban on racial discrimination in hotels, theaters, railroads, and other public accommodations, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment stopped states from discriminating, but not private businesses.
With federal oversight gone, some states began rewriting their state constitutions to include de jure segregation, meaning segregation required by law (as opposed to de facto segregation, which happens through custom and practice without a law requiring it). Mississippi's constitution of 1890 is a key example: it required separate schools for white and Black children and added new barriers to voting, and other Southern states followed its model over the next two decades.
Taking Away the Vote
The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) made it unconstitutional to deny a citizen the vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." So Southern lawmakers wrote voting rules that never mentioned race, but that were designed, and enforced, to keep Black men away from the polls:
- Poll taxes: A fee had to be paid in order to vote. For sharecroppers already trapped in debt, even a dollar or two could put voting out of reach.
- Literacy tests: Voters had to read, or sometimes explain, a passage (often from the state constitution) to the satisfaction of a white registrar. Because registrars decided who passed, educated Black men could be failed while white men who couldn't read were waved through.
- Grandfather clauses: These exempted a man from the new requirements if he, his father, or his grandfather had been able to vote before a set date, such as January 1, 1867, in Louisiana. Since Black men in the South couldn't vote before 1867, the exemption protected white voters only.
The results were devastating. Before Louisiana adopted its 1898 constitution, which added a grandfather clause, a poll tax, and a literacy requirement, about 44 percent of the state's registered voters were Black. Black registration in Louisiana fell from 130,344 in 1896 to just 1,342 by 1904. The Supreme Court struck down grandfather clauses in Guinn v. United States (1915), but poll taxes and literacy tests survived for decades. The Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) finally banned poll taxes in federal elections, the Supreme Court struck them down in state elections in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966), and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended literacy tests in the states and counties it covered, mostly in the South (later amendments banned them nationwide).
Violence and Terror
Laws were only part of the story. African Americans who voted, ran for office, or simply asserted their rights were endangered by acts of racial violence, including lynching, and by retaliation from former Confederates, political terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and others who embraced white supremacist doctrine. The Klan, founded by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, right after the Civil War, used night raids, whippings, and murder to terrorize Black communities and the white Republicans who worked with them. In the 1870s, groups like the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts in Mississippi and South Carolina operated more openly, using armed violence to drive Black voters and Republican officials out of power. One of the deadliest attacks came in Colfax, Louisiana, on Easter Sunday in 1873, when an armed white mob killed dozens of Black men, many after they had already surrendered. Violence like this was a deliberate political strategy, meant to make voting and holding office too dangerous for African Americans to risk.
Plessy v. Ferguson and "Separate but Equal"
In 1890, Louisiana passed a law requiring railroads to provide "equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races." A group of Black and Creole activists in New Orleans, the Citizens' Committee (Comité des Citoyens), organized a test case to challenge it. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth Black under the racial categories of the time, bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railway, sat in the car reserved for white passengers, and was arrested when he refused to move. His lawyers argued that the law violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that the Louisiana law was constitutional. This doctrine of "separate but equal" became the legal basis for racial segregation in many parts of American life, from trains and streetcars to schools and hospitals.
In practice, though, "separate" was almost never "equal." Plessy legalized separate and unequal resources, facilities, and rights, and Black schools, for example, routinely received far less funding than white schools. It would take another Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), for "separate but equal" to begin to be dismantled.
Required Sources
Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court Ruling, 1896
In the passages below, the Court argues that the Fourteenth Amendment ("the amendment") guaranteed political equality but not social equality, and that a law separating the races didn't mark Black Americans as inferior. If Black Americans felt insulted by segregation, the majority claimed, that was their own interpretation, not the law's. Reading the Court's own words shows exactly how "separate but equal" was justified on paper, even as it became the foundation for the deeply unequal Jim Crow system. Justice John Marshall Harlan, the only dissenter, rejected this reasoning, writing that "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens," and predicting that the decision would prove "quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case."
The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.
[...]
We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.
Justice Henry Billings Brown for the Court, Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (May 18, 1896), excerpts. Source: United States Reports, vol. 163, pp. 544 and 551