1. Confronting The Meaning of Equality
Post-Civil War Years

2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Declaration of Sentiments
Seneca Falls, NY 1848
Susan B. Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Declaration of Sentiments

3. U.S. Supreme Court, 1857 Dred Scott Decision
… declared that all blacks -- slaves as well as free -- were not and could never become citizens of the United States. …because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The framers of the Constitution, he wrote, believed that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it." …Referring to the language in the Declaration of Independence that includes the phrase, "all men are created equal," the Court reasoned that "it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration "

4. Thaddeus Stevens 1865 “40 Acres & a Mule”
We have turned, or are about to turn, loose four million slaves without a hut to shelter them or a cent in their pockets. The infernal laws of slavery have prevented them from acquiring an education, understanding the common laws of contract, or of managing the ordinary business of life. This Congress is bound to provide for them until they can take care of themselves. If we do not furnish them with homesteads, and hedge them around with protective laws; if we leave them to the legislation of their late masters, we had better have left them in bondage. If we fail in this great duty now, when we have the power, we shall deserve and receive the execration of history and of all future ages.
“40 Acres & a Mule”

5. Civil War

6. Population in Slave States

7. Civil War

8. U.S. War Deaths

9. Emancipation Proclamation 1863
"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”

10. In a single week. . .
April 9, 1865
April 15, 1865

11. Post-Civil War Amendments
13th Amendment (1865)
Ended Slavery
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

12. Post-Civil War Amendments
14th Amendment (1868)
Granted Equal Rights to All Races
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.

13. Post-Civil War Amendments
15th Amendment (1870)
Granted Voting Rights to Male Citizens of All Races
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

14. Allowed person from Africa to become US Citizens
Post-Civil War Laws
Naturalization Law of 1870
Allowed person from Africa to become US Citizens
“Sec. 7. And be it further enacted, That the naturalization laws are hereby extended to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.”

15. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Should women support the the 15th Amendment if it does not include women?
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“We say not another man, black or white, until woman is inside the citadel. What reason have we to suppose the African would be more just and generous than the Saxon has been?...how insulting to put every shade and type of manhood above our heads, to make laws for educated refined, wealthy women....The old anti slavery school says women must stand back and wait until the negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. If intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of the woman be brought up first and that of the negro last....

16. Should Blacks fight to include women in the 15th Amendment?
Frederick Douglas
“I champion the right of the negro to vote. It is with us a matter of life and death, and therefore can not be postponed. I have always championed women’s right to vote; but it will be seen that the present claim for the negro is one of the most urgent necessity. The assertion of the right of women to vote meets nothing but ridicule; there is no deep seated malignity in the hearts of the people against her; but name the right of the negro to vote, and all hell is turned loose and the Ku-Klux and Regulators hunt and slay the unoffending black man. The government of this country loves women. They are the sisters, mothers, wives and daughters of our rulers; but the negro is loathed....The negro needs suffrage to protect his life and property, and to assure him respect and education. He needs it for the safety of reconstruction and the salvation of the Union; for his own elevation from the position of a drudge to that of an influential member of society.”

17. Post-Civil War Reconstruction 1865-1877
“40 Acres & a Mule”
Military stationed in South
Freedmen’s Bureau
Real Black Voting
Black Elected Officials

18. The Election of 1876 Ended Reconstruction
Rutherford B. Hayes Samuel J. Tilden
Republican Democratic
Ohio New York
To gain southern support, Hayes agreed that, if elected president, he would end Reconstruction and remove federal troops from the south.

19. Civil Rights Act of 1875
Whereas it is essential to just government we recognize the equality of all men before the law, and hold that it is the duty of government in its dealings with the people to mete out equal and exact justice to all, of whatever nativity, race, color, or persuasion, religious or political; and it being the appropriate object of legislation to enact great fundamental principles into law: Therefore, Be it enacted, That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude. SEC. 2. That any person who shall violate the foregoing section by denying to any citizen, except for reasons by law applicable to citizens of every race and color, and regardless of any previous condition of servitude, the full enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, or privileges in said section enumerated, or by aiding or inciting such denial, shall, for every such offense, forfeit and pay the sum of five hundred dollars ($10,417 today) to the person aggrieved thereby, and shall also, for every such offense, be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, upon conviction thereof, shall be fined not less than five hundred nor more than one thousand dollars, or shall be imprisoned not less than thirty days nor more than one year . . .

20. United States Supreme Court Civil Rights Cases 1883
It is State action of a particular character that is prohibited. Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject matter of the amendment. It has a deeper and broader scope. It nullifies and makes void all State legislation, and State action of every kind, which impairs the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States or which injures them in life, liberty or property without due process of law, or which denies to any of them the equal protection of the laws. It not only does this, but, in order that the national will, thus declared, may not be a mere brutum fulmen, the last section of the amendment invests Congress with power to enforce it by appropriate legislation. To enforce what? To enforce the prohibition. To adopt appropriate legislation for correcting the effects of such prohibited State laws and State acts, and thus to render them effectually null, void, and innocuous. This is the legislative power conferred upon Congress, and this is the whole of it. It does not invest Congress with power to legislate upon subjects which are within the domain of State legislation, but to provide modes of relief against State legislation, or State action, of the kind referred to. It does not authorize Congress to create a code of municipal law for the regulation of private rights, but to provide modes of redress against the operation of State laws and the action of State officers executive or judicial when these are subversive of the fundamental rights specified in the amendment.

21. 14th Amendment says
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

22. U.S. Supreme Court, 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson
State laws requiring “separate but equal” treatment of persons of different races are constitutional
“Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based on physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the differences of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.”
"We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

23. Segregated Democracy 1860s-1960s
Individual people and private businesses were free to practice discrimination.
States were allowed to require “separate but equal” services.
Restaurants
Hotels
Entertainment Facilities
Housing
Neighborhoods
Employment
Schools
Military
Marriage
And much more…

24. Signs of Segregated Democracy

25. Post Civil War Means of Oppression 1860s – 1960s
Social
Inferiority, restricted housing
Segregated accommodations
Economic
Sharecropping, convict leasing
Debt peonage, Union race policies
Political
Poll tax, Literacy test
Grandfather clause
Educational
Segregated and unequal schools
Physical/Psychological
Ku Klux Klan Terror
Lynchings (2,805 from )