Key Concepts of Post-Civil War Reconstruction Era

Black Codes

laws instilled in 1865 and 1866 in the former Confederate states to restrict freedom and opportunities for African Americans

Civil right

a right that is guaranteed to all citizens of a country

13th Amendment

a constitutional change ratified in 1865 abolishing slavery in the United States

14th Amendment

a constitutional change ratified in 1868 giving citizenship to all former slaves by declaring that anyone born in the United States is a citizen; extended the rights of due process of equal protection under the law to Black people

15th Amendment

a constitutional change ratified in 1870 granting Black men the right to vote

Freedmen's Bureau

a federal agency established in 1865, at the end of the Civil War, to help and protect the 4 million newly freed African Americans as they transitioned out of enslavement

Plessy v Ferguson

the 1896 Supreme Court case that established the controversial "separate but equal" doctrine by which segregation became legal as long as the facilities provided to Black people were equivalent to those provided to White people

Jim Crow Law

any of the laws legalizing racial segregation of Black people and White people that were enacted in Southern states beginning in the 1880s and enforced through the 1950s

Klu Klux Klan

established in 1866, a secret, White supremacist terrorist group that resisted Reconstruction by harassing, threatening, and using violence against Black people

Literacy test

a test of one's ability to read and write

lynched

to kill someone without approval by law, often by hanging and by a mob of people

Poll tax

a tax that is imposed on a person in exchange for the right to vote

Radical Republican

during and after the Civil War, a member of the Republican Party who believed in and fought for the emancipation of enslaved people and, later, the equal rights of African Americans

Segregation

the forced separation of races in public places

Sharecropping

a form of tenant farming in which the land owner provides a tenant not only with land but also with the money needed to purchase equipment and supplies and possibly also food, clothing, and supervision

Tenant farming

a system of agriculture in which landowners rent plots of land to workers, who pay for the use of the land in cash, with a share of the crop raised, or both