Jim Crow part 3 | The Gilded Age (1865-1898) | US History | Khan Academy

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. These codes, in many cases, were really just slavery by another name. They prevented African Americans from voting, from owning firearms, and forced them into some kind of labor contract; otherwise, they might be enslaved or jailed for vagrancy.

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. The 14th Amendment guaranteed that anyone born in the United States, regardless of previous condition of servitude, had full citizenship. This meant they were 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, dividing the southern region up into military zones. They declared that the South would be occupied by federal troops until the states rewrote their constitutions to recognize the 14th Amendment, effectively to give equal citizenship to African Americans. In fact, they also passed the 15th Amendment two years later, in 1870, which stated that voting rights were 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 would not get the right to vote until 1920. So, from the 14th Amendment until 1877, there was a military occupation in the South. Military troops were only taken away from the southern states when they rewrote their constitutions to grant equal citizenship to African Americans.

Now, you can imagine in the South, where whites had had racial supremacy since the 1600s, getting them to recognize social equality with African Americans was an incredible struggle. 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 and tried to enforce the end of slavery and the citizenship of African Americans, facing really implacable resistance from white Southerners. By 1877, only two states were left that still had troops, because 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.