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US history
Course: US history > Unit 6
Lesson 2: The South after the Civil War- Life after slavery for African Americans
- The origins of Jim Crow - introduction
- Origins of Jim Crow - the Black Codes and Reconstruction
- Origins of Jim Crow - the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
- Origins of Jim Crow - Compromise of 1877 and Plessy v. Ferguson
- Plessy v. Ferguson
- The Compromise of 1877
- Jim Crow
- The New South
- The South after the Civil War
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Origins of Jim Crow - the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
During Reconstruction, federal troops attempted to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the South.
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- What were the names of the last two states to rewrite their constitution and have the troops removed?(3 votes)
- I believe Kim circled (at) Louisiana and South Carolina. 3:31(6 votes)
- how did reconstrution work?(5 votes)
- It was the plans put in place to get America back to a united and functioning state.(1 vote)
- what if you were black and an immigrant? did they do anything different?(3 votes)
- No the 14 admendment said anyone. It didnt matter if you were black and an immigrant.(2 votes)
- Did the 15th amendment only apply to African American men who owned property or was it just African American men over the age of 18 in general? Thank you.(2 votes)
- It applies to everyone in the US. It states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude", so all it does it that it says no one can restrict who can vote and who can't based on race, skin color or if they were previously enslaved.(3 votes)
- Do we still use the Admendments to this day?(2 votes)
- Yes, we do still use the Amendments to this day. Once an amendment is passed, it can only be repealed by another amendment (i.e. the Prohibition).(3 votes)
- How did the era of reconstruction come about?(2 votes)
- The Era of Reconstruction was the time after the Civil War where the northern powers tried to make at fairer country for the African, Indian, Asian, and in general Non-White men who where being repressed.(3 votes)
- why did they send the federal troupe to state in the South?(2 votes)
- In order to enforce the laws that were passed by the federal government. Keep in mind that the country was just recently in a massive and bloody war and that resentment to the North is probably endemic in the South and the lawmakers wanted to make sure that the South was controlled so that more conflict could be avoided.(2 votes)
- why was the black code involde? why did they need citizenships? why was the voting write only for women?(2 votes)
- All people who identify with a nation need citizenship. Being born there is enough reason. That's part of what it means to be America... people born here are citizens.
The "black codes" were invalid because they were racist. All "racial" categorization of human beings is invalid. We are all ONE under the skin, and should be ONE no matter what amount of melanin our skin contains. The amendments that granted voting to women nationwide were necessary because at the beginning, America only let property owning white males vote. It took over 100 years to allow voting to all Americans over 21 years of age, and another 50 or so to grant it to all Americans old enough to carry a gun in a war. I know that, because I went to war (in 1970) not old enough to vote, but bny 1972 the age was dropped to 18.(2 votes)
- Who agreed to having slavery? What made the U.S want to get african americans to be their slaves?(2 votes)
- Towards the beginning, they used poor Europeans as laborers. Once they started surviving and getting rich, they changed to native americans, which didn't last long because they were not immune to the dieses. So they used african americans since they were immune and easier to get.(1 vote)
- Kim makes it sound like the troops were deployed to the south merely to enforce an already legally ratified amendment. But according to this video (https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/civil-war-era/reconstruction/v/reconstruction-amendments-14th-amendment) (See) and this Wikipedia page ( 3:41https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Ratification_by_the_states) it seems like the troops came there in order to force the states to ratify the amendment. How is that legal?(2 votes)
Video transcript
- [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.