Conclusion: Rise of Jim Crow and the Legacy of Reconstruction

Reconstruction failed to achieve racial equality. Though it reunited the Southern and Northern states into one country after the American Civil War, citizens were divided by racism. The possibilities of equality introduced by Reconstruction were followed by intense backlash. This period was characterized by segregation laws, voter suppression, and violence against Black Americans. 

The Louisiana Constitution of 1898[1] mandated racially segregated public schools and severely restricted Black men’s right to vote, stripping away rights granted in the 1868 Constitution. In the decades after Reconstruction, public transportation, restaurants, hotels, and playgrounds were all segregated by race, with white people receiving priority and better facilities. Black men, and later Black women, were disenfranchised by strict voting requirements that included property ownership, poll taxes, and literacy tests.    

Emboldened by the removal of Federal Troops from the South,  white supremacist groups and racist mobs publicly murdered Black Americans in racial terror lynchings to threaten Black communities and coerce them into living under a racial hierarchy. Foreshadowed by violence such as the Mechanics Institute Massacre in 1866, white supremacists lynched more than 4,000 Black Americans in the southern states between 1877 and 1950—including 549 lynchings in Louisiana[2].

Dorothea Lange, “One side of the monument erected to race 
prejudice, New Orleans, Louisiana,” July 1936, photograph, 
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

The backlash to Reconstruction was reflected in public memorials that honored the Confederacy as a noble “Lost Cause.” During the late 1800s and early 1900s, groups built monuments and memorials throughout the South that celebrated white supremacists. In New Orleans, groups of former Confederates and their sympathizers created the Battle of Liberty Place Monument in 1891[3]. In 1932, the city government commissioned a plaque[4] which was added to the monument and declared “United State Troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the south and gave us our state.” This blatantly racist monument was publicly displayed on city property until it was removed in 2017.

Black activists and their allies organized, protested, and advocated for their rights, securing several victories in the Civil Rights Movement of the1950s and 1960s. Segregation legalized in Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954[5]. Advocacy by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) laid the basis for this case. The U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional because it violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment—the same argument that the Citizens’ Committee made nearly sixty years before. The Civil Rights Act of 1964[6] outlawed discrimination in voting rights, accommodations, public facilities, education, and employment—which were many of the same rights that the Civil Rights of Act of 1875 granted but failed to enforce. 

Civil Rights Act of 1964, Public Law 88-352, 78 STAT 241, 
July 2, 1964, National Archives and Records Administration

The Civil Rights Movement brought the Jim Crow era to an end and granted rights and protections for Black Americans—and all citizens—that were attempted during Reconstruction. Yet, there are ongoing conversations about how different groups experience unequal treatment in America today. Lessons from Reconstruction and its impacts can provide insights to current social issues in the United States.