Description
By the early 1870s, violence by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups of Southern whites was weakening the Republican state governments that had come to power in the South. The civil rights conferred on former slaves by the 14th and 15th Amendments were preserved only through federal intervention, and Northern commitment to the provision of such protection soon waned. In this eighth and final e-seminar of the series Slavery and Emancipation, Professor Eric Foner traces the developments that brought Reconstruction to an end and discusses what that ending meant for Southern blacks and for the nation. By 1900, a new racial order had been imposed in the South, resting on segregation, disenfranchisement, and the economic subordination of blacks. But the ideals of Reconstruction remained embedded in the Constitution, and eventually, in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, another generation would strive for the equal citizenship and interracial democracy that were first attempted in the period following the Civil War. The e-seminar presents streaming video of Professor Foner's lecture and combines it with text, images, a who's who, a timeline, primary documents, and a discussion board.