Post-Reconstruction America built a racial apartheid system Nazi Germany copied

Evidence

There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 157

Categorization

• XREF: The Nazi-Jim Crow influence link is a well-documented historiographical thread (the Nuremberg Laws drew on US race codes) and surfaces again later in the 1619 Project’s treatment of race science. — connects to: Nazi racial policy was modeled on American white supremacy — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 746; American eugenics served as a model for Nazi Germany — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4293
• QUESTION: Worth verifying the specific claim that the returned-veteran violence wave spanned the North as well as the South — that geographic breadth is a contested empirical claim historians might quibble with.