APUSH 6B Vocab

“New South”

A vision for a post-Civil War Southern economy focused on industrialization and modernization rather than a sole reliance on plantation agriculture.

sharecropping

A labor system where tenants worked a landowner’s land in exchange for a portion of the crops, often resulting in a cycle of permanent debt.

redeemers

White Southern Democrats who sought to regain political control from Republican Reconstruction governments and restore traditional social hierarchies.

Civil Rights Cases of 1883

A series of Supreme Court decisions ruling that the 14th Amendment prohibited state-sponsored discrimination but not discrimination by private individuals or businesses.

Plessy v. Ferguson

The landmark Supreme Court case that established the “separate but equal” doctrine, legally justifying racial segregation.

Jim Crow Laws

State and local laws that enforced racial segregation and disenfranchisement in the Southern United States from the late 19th century until the mid-20th century.

literacy tests

Subjective exams administered at polling places to disqualify Black voters by requiring them to read and interpret complex texts.

poll taxes

A fee required for voting, used as a tool to disenfranchise poor African Americans and many poor whites

grandfather clauses

Laws that allowed men to vote only if their ancestors had been eligible to vote before 1867, effectively exempting whites from literacy tests and poll taxes.

Ida B. Wells

An African American journalist and activist who led a powerful international anti-lynching crusade and advocated for civil rights.

Exodusters

Large numbers of African Americans who migrated from the South to Kansas in the late 1870s to escape oppression and seek economic opportunity.

Booker T. Washington

An influential Black leader who advocated for vocational education and economic self-reliance as the primary path to racial progress.

Tuskegee Institute

A historically Black university founded by Booker T. Washington to provide practical training in agriculture and the trades.

Atlanta Compromise

An 1895 speech by Washington proposing that Blacks should temporarily accept social segregation in exchange for economic opportunities and vocational education.

W.E.B. DuBois

A prominent intellectual and civil rights activist who demanded immediate political and social equality for African Americans and co-founded the NAACP.

talented tenth

A concept proposed by W.E.B. DuBois stating that the top 10% of educated African Americans should take the lead in the fight for social change and racial equality.