- [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.