Desegregation: Encyclopedia II - Desegregation - Segregation after the Civil War

Desegregation - Segregation after the Civil War

After the Civil War a series of constitutional amendments were passed:

• The Thirteenth prohibited slavery.
• The Fourteenth, among other things, granted citizenship to everyone born in the United States.
• The Fifteenth guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race or previous condition of servitude.

Together these amendments allowed blacks a large role in the political process during the Reconstruction. On both a per capita and absolute basis, more blacks were elected to political office during the period from 1865 to 1880 than at any other time in American history. After the disbanding of the Freedmens Bureau and other Reconstruction institutions, federal officials decided that the enforcement of voting rights was strictly a state matter. This strict interpration of federalism was overthrown when the United States Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 almost a century later.

Racial desegregation was handed a setback in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that the Fourteenth Amendment did not require facilities to be racially integrated as long as they were equal, and the separate but equal doctrine prevailed for well over a half-century until it was reversed in 1954 by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the court found that racially separate facilities were inherently unequal.

In 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded to foster racial integration and fair treatment toward citizens of color. One of the founders of this group was the black intellectual W. E. B. DuBois. Other important groups fostering integration were the Congress of Racial Equality, the Urban League, and, later, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Racial integration was also encouraged by the leaders of most Jewish groups and of some labor unions, although many unions vigorously opposed it, viewing black labor as competition with white labor.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Segregation after the Civil War", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki