yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

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


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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.

More Articles

View All
Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter
Imagine NASA announced today that they found aliens. Bacteria on Mars, weird alien fish in the oceans of Europa, and also ancient alien ruins on Titan. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, no. It would be horrible news, devastating even. It could mean that the e…
Philosophies on Failure & Learning
Life looks like this to me: um, you know, you start off and you head in a direction, and you evolve. And then you have your setbacks and the pains and so on. Ideally, you learn and you readapt, and you go on, and you have another one of those. It’s that p…
Carl Jung & The Psychology of Self-Sabotage (feat. Emerald)
Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking. Also, it frequently happens that unconscious motives overrule our conscious decisions, especially in matters of vital importa…
How to Make a Kurzgesagt Video in 1200 Hours
For years, people have asked how we make our videos. So, let’s finally talk about it. How to Make a Kurzgesagt Video in 1,200 Hours or More (Kurzgesagt intro) Kurzgesagt in a Nutshell. But first things first, we need a topic. Our potential topic list is…
Examples finding the domain of functions
In this video, we’re going to do a few examples finding domains of functions. So, let’s say that we have the function f of x is equal to x plus 5 over x minus 2. What is going to be the domain of this function? Pause this video and try to figure that out.…
Building a Gym with Reusable Materials | Life Below Zero
♪ For me, I got to get my poop, so to speak, in a square. Tighten it up so that I’m super Sue again. But how do I do that? These are the two overflow tents, and I’m not gonna have people using them for quite a while. So I want to annex this one and make i…