3.4 The Defeat of Reconstruction

The presidential election of 1876 between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden was disputed. In the Compromise of 1877, Democrats accepted Hayes as president, and federal troops were withdrawn from the last Southern states where they protected Republican governments. With no federal protection, white Southern Democrats took full control of state governments.

Southern states then rewrote their constitutions to include de jure segregation, meaning segregation required by law (as opposed to de facto segregation, which exists in practice without a law).

None of these rules mentioned race, so they could get around the Fifteenth Amendment, but they were designed to keep Black men from voting, and they worked.

• Poll taxes: a fee to vote, which many poor Black (and white) Southerners couldn't pay.
• Literacy tests: reading or 'understanding' tests, applied unfairly by white officials to reject Black voters.
• Grandfather clauses: exempted men from these tests if their grandfathers could vote before 1867, which protected poor white voters while excluding Black voters, whose grandfathers had been enslaved.

Racial violence enforced the new order. Former Confederates and terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865, attacked Black voters, officeholders, teachers and anyone who challenged white supremacy. Lynching, the public killing of a person by a mob without a trial, became a tool of terror meant to keep Black communities from voting, organizing or getting ahead.

In 1890 Louisiana passed a law requiring railroads to provide 'equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races'. A group of Black and Creole activists in New Orleans organized a test case. In 1892 Homer Plessy, a man of mixed ancestry who could pass as white, sat in a whites-only car and was arrested.

In 1896 the Supreme Court upheld the law, 7 to 1. The majority said segregation was legal as long as facilities were equal. This doctrine of 'separate but equal' became the legal basis for segregation in schools, transportation, hospitals and much more.

Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented alone, writing, 'Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.'

In practice, separate was never equal: Black schools, train cars and hospitals got far fewer resources. It took Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to begin dismantling 'separate but equal' (4.4).