White Southern backlash nullified Reconstruction amendments through law and terror

Evidence

Tragically, the Black freedom dreams that propelled swift progress toward equality were arrested by the late 1870s, as a fierce white backlash against Black freedom succeeded in turning back the clock on racial progress. Southern white people effectively nullified the post–Civil War amendments that were intended to dismantle the racial caste system in the South, including the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing “equal protection of the laws,” and the Fifteenth Amendment. The Freedmen’s Bureau—an agency created by Congress in 1865 and charged with the responsibility of providing food, clothing, and other forms of assistance to destitute former enslaved people—was dismantled, and a plethora of discriminatory practices, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, were employed to prevent Black people from exercising their right to vote and gaining political power. When those efforts proved insufficient to maintain complete control, white Southerners wielded their most effective weapon: vigilante violence and terrorism. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 386

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s ‘deviation vs design’ frame: the nullification of the 14th and 15th Amendments shows racial caste persisting despite explicit constitutional design. Connects to the Wilentz-letter controversy about whether the reframing overstates continuity. — connects to: Confederate monument construction spikes track eras of white political reassertion. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 342; White backlash against the Civil Rights Act delivered the South to the Republican Party — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 519; Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery and guaranteed equal protection and due process nationally — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 273 (+4 more)