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Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of freedom for enslaved people living in Confederate-controlled areas on January 1, 1863.
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An 1870 constitutional amendment forbidding discrimination in voting on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
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An early social welfare project established on the coast of South Carolina after U.S. troops occupied the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia early in the war. Medical professionals, teachers, and missionaries came from the North to help freed people in their transition to freedom.
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The separation of Black and white people into separate racial groups in daily life.
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An 1865 constitutional amendment that outlawed slavery in the United States except as a punishment for a crime.
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African Americans who fled the South in search of better opportunities and treatment in the West after the Civil War.
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A massacre of captured U.S. troops, half of whom were Black, ordered by General Nathan Bedford Forrest when Fort Pillow fell to Confederate troops in the spring of 1864.
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A university located in Nashville, Tennessee, founded in 1866 to offer higher education to African American students.
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Statutes discriminating against nonwhite Americans, particularly in the South. The term specifically refers to regulations enforcing racial segregation.
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The Bureau of Refugees, Freedman, and Abandoned Lands, a government agency formed in 1865 and administered by the army in the area of the former Confederacy. It afforded aid and protection to freed people and assistance to poor white southerners.
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Native American name for the Black soldiers of the U.S. 9th and 10th Cavalry units. They served in the western territories and attempted to keep the peace between Native Americans and white settlers.
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One of many white terrorist organizations associated with the bitterest and most violent opponents of Reconstruction and Black freedom. Formed in Pulaski, Tennessee, in late 1865, Klan members devoted themselves to denying African Americans any legitimate role in the public sphere, stressing the superiority of white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon citizens.