- [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.
