Unit 2 Terms

Freedmen’s Bureau

A federal agency created to provide aid for enslaved people who were emancipated.

13th Amendment

Abolishes slavery.

Radical Republican

A group of Republican political leaders dedicated to imposing harsh conditions on the states that had seceded from the Union during the Civil War.

14 Amendment

The constitutional amendment, ratified in July 1868, which guaranteed full citizenship, status, and rights to every person born in the United States, protected due process, and guaranteed equal protection of/under the law.

15th Amendment

The constitutional amendment, ratified in February 1870, which guaranteed voting rights to all males, regardless of race.

KKK

A secret society formed in the South with the intention of promoting white supremacy and denying African Americans the exercise of their new rights.

Jim Crow Laws

State laws that required the separation of whites and blacks. These laws placed limits on access to voting through the literacy test, poll tax, and grandfather clause. It also prohibited interracial marriage.

Compromise of 1877

An agreement by which Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican/North) won the 1876 presidential election and in exchange agreed to remove all remaining federal troops from the south. Results of this agreement were reconstruction ended, the Democratic Party regained control of southern state governments, state governments institutionalized laws that harmed rights of black citizens.

Plessy v. Ferguson

The Supreme Court said segregation did not violate the 14th amendment if there were separate but equal facilities for whites and blacks.

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was born into slavery and grew up in poverty following emancipation. In 1881, Washington was chosen to head the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institution, where he promoted vocational education for African American students. He encouraged African American citizens to accept segregation and to instead focus on improving themselves through education and economic opportunities. He also worked as a janitor, promoted vocational education (trades or labor), Founded the Tuscany Institute (a vocational school).

W.E.B DuBois

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an American educator, reformer, and champion of civil rights. He is best known for his book The Souls of Black Folk in which he criticizes the more accommodating approach of Booker T. Washington and advocates for full civil rights for African Americans. Du Bois went on to help found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. He was also a social activist and earned a PhD from Harvard University

Exoduster

Black Americans, who left primarily in 1879/after the Civil War, to go to the south to seek a better life in the west. Many went to Kansas and Oklahoma.

Manifest Destiny

The belief that the United States was destined by God’s will to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

Homestead Act

A law (1862) that offered, at most no cost, land plots of 160 acres to anyone willing to live on it for 5 years, build a home, and grow some crops.

Transcontinental Railroad

Rail link between the eastern and the western United States.

Reservation

Land that would be owned and managed by the federal government for the Native Americans.

Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull (1831?-1890) was a war chief and important spiritual leader who became the first-ever chief of all the Lakota Sioux bands

in the 1860s. After surrendering to the Army in 1881, he lived on a reservation where he was killed by Indian police sent to arrest him.

Battle of Little Bighorn

Caused because gold was discovered in the Black Hills area of South Dakota and settlers wanted to mine it.

Assimilation