Explain how old political and social structures reemerged after Reconstruction and racial discrimination was institutionalized

Learning goal: Explain how, following Reconstruction, old political and social structures reemerged in the South and racial discrimination was institutionalized through law, courts, the economy and violence. Distinguish discrimination by individuals from discrimination built into institutions, and trace African American responses.

What Reconstruction had changed. Between 1865 and 1877 the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery (except as punishment for a crime, an exception that convict leasing later used), the Fourteenth (1868) made formerly enslaved people citizens and promised equal protection of the laws, and the Fifteenth (1870) forbade denying the vote on account of race. With federal troops in the South, African American men voted in large numbers and were elected to state legislatures and to Congress. These changes depended on federal enforcement.

The end of Reconstruction. White Southern Democrats who called themselves "Redeemers" regained control of state governments one by one, often with the help of fraud and of violence by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and later the White League and the Red Shirts. The disputed presidential election of 1876 was settled in early 1877: Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president, and federal troops were withdrawn from the statehouses of South Carolina and Louisiana, where they had supported Republican governments. This arrangement is often called the Compromise of 1877. The last Republican state governments in the South fell, and the governments that replaced them repealed or stopped funding many Reconstruction reforms.

Old structures reemerge. The phrase "old political and social structures" means that the people and relationships of the pre-war South regained power in new forms. Politically, the Democratic Party dominated the region so completely that it was called the "Solid South." Economically, most African Americans and many poor white farmers worked as sharecroppers or tenants on land owned by others, paying a share of the crop as rent and buying supplies on credit secured by the next crop (the crop-lien system). Debt often tied families to the same landowner year after year. Convict leasing allowed states to rent prisoners, most of them Black men convicted under laws that targeted them, to plantations, mines and railroads, where many died; the Thirteenth Amendment's exception for punishment of crime left this legal. The planter's control over labor was rebuilt without legal slavery.

Racial discrimination was institutionalized. Institutionalized means built into laws, courts, government practice and the rules of economic life, so that discrimination operated whether or not any particular person intended it. Three kinds of institutions did this.

Segregation laws. Southern states and cities passed laws, later called Jim Crow laws, requiring separate railroad cars, schools, hospitals, parks and other facilities for Black and white people, and banning marriage between them. The Supreme Court allowed this. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883) it struck down the public-accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment reached only state action, not private businesses. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) it upheld a Louisiana law requiring separate railroad cars, holding that "separate but equal" facilities did not violate equal protection. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, writing that "Our Constitution is color-blind." In practice, facilities for Black citizens were almost never equal.

Disenfranchisement. Because the Fifteenth Amendment forbade racial voting tests directly, states used rules that did not mention race but were designed and administered to exclude Black voters. Mississippi's constitution of 1890 set the pattern, and other Southern states followed by about 1908. Tools included poll taxes (a fee to vote, often cumulative); literacy tests and "understanding" clauses judged by white registrars; long residency requirements; grandfather clauses, which exempted men whose ancestors could vote before 1867, first adopted by Louisiana in 1898; and, openly racial rather than race-neutral, white primaries, party rules and later state laws that excluded Black voters from the Democratic primary, the only election that mattered in a one-party region (the Supreme Court struck them down in Smith v. Allwright, 1944). In Williams v. Mississippi (1898) the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi's poll tax and literacy requirements because they did not name race. Black voter registration collapsed across the South, and many poor white voters were also removed.

Violence. Lynching, murder by a mob without trial, was used to terrorize African Americans; thousands of Black Americans were lynched between the 1880s and the 1930s. Few perpetrators were ever punished. In 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, armed white supremacists overthrew the elected city government and killed Black residents. Violence enforced what law and custom established.

African American responses. Black Americans resisted in many ways. Ida B. Wells, a journalist, investigated lynchings and published Southern Horrors (1892), showing that the accusations used to justify them were often false. Booker T. Washington, in a speech in Atlanta in 1895, urged economic advancement through vocational education while accepting segregation for the time being; this position is often called the Atlanta Compromise. W. E. B. Du Bois criticized that approach in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), demanded full civil and political rights, helped found the Niagara Movement in 1905 and helped found the NAACP in 1909. In Guinn v. United States (1915), a case supported by the NAACP, the Supreme Court struck down Oklahoma's grandfather clause.

A worked model: tracing one institution. Take the vote. 1870: the Fifteenth Amendment forbids racial denial. 1877: troops stop protecting the last Southern Republican governments, and federal protection of Black voters weakens sharply (Congress repealed most of the remaining federal election-enforcement laws in 1894). 1890: Mississippi adopts a poll tax and literacy test. 1898: the Supreme Court upholds them in Williams. Result: most Black men in the state cannot register. The law never named race, yet the system excluded by race. That is institutionalized discrimination.

The misconception to avoid. Students often think segregation simply continued from slavery unchanged, or that it was only a matter of private prejudice. Most Jim Crow laws were written between the 1880s and the 1900s, after Reconstruction, by governments, and were upheld by courts. They were built deliberately.

Worked reading of Plessy: Facts: Homer Plessy, who was of mixed ancestry, sat in a whites-only railroad car in Louisiana in 1892 to test the state's Separate Car Act of 1890 and was arrested. Question: does a state law requiring separate but equal railroad cars violate the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause? Holding (1896): no. Harlan's dissent: the Constitution is color-blind and the law imposed a badge of inferiority. Consequence: the decision gave constitutional approval to segregation laws until Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Worked analysis of a race-neutral rule: Rule: a voter must pay a poll tax. Text: no mention of race. Design and effect: most Black Southerners were poor sharecroppers who could least afford the tax; registrars applied rules unequally; grandfather clauses exempted many white men. Conclusion: a rule neutral on its face can institutionalize discrimination through its design, its administration and its exemptions. The step students skip is examining exemptions and who enforces the rule.

Worked comparison of responses: Washington (1895): accept segregation for now; build economic strength through vocational education. Du Bois (1903 onward): demand full civil and political rights now, including higher education and the vote. Wells (1892): expose lynching with evidence and call for action. All three are evidence of African American agency; historians debate how far Washington's public accommodation hid private support for legal challenges, which is an interpretation to label.

Institution chart: Make a four-row chart for segregation, disenfranchisement, economic control and violence. For each, record the specific laws, cases or practices with dates; how it operated; which old structure it restored; and one African American response.

Independent performance: Write a 400-word explanation of how old political and social structures reemerged after Reconstruction and how racial discrimination was institutionalized. Success criteria: explains the end of Reconstruction in 1877 with the withdrawal of federal troops; defines institutionalized discrimination and shows it in at least two of law, courts, economy and violence; accurately explains Plessy v. Ferguson and at least two disenfranchisement tools; describes at least two African American responses; and treats violence accurately and seriously, without sensational detail.

Face-neutral rules: For the poll tax, the literacy test and the grandfather clause, write one sentence stating what the rule said, one explaining how it excluded Black voters in practice, and one naming the court case, if any, that upheld or struck it down with its year.