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An 1868 constitutional amendment removing racial restrictions on citizenship and mandating equal justice before the law.
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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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U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the legality of Jim Crow laws, declaring that segregation based on race was constitutional as long as “separate” facilities were “equal.” It soon became clear, however, that facilities for Black Americans, such as schools, railroad cars, and waiting rooms, were rarely, if ever, equal to those provided for white people.
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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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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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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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Statutes discriminating against nonwhite Americans, particularly in the South. The term specifically refers to regulations enforcing racial segregation.
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The period following the Civil War when radical Republicans in Congress took control of Reconstruction policy, enacting legislation to protect the rights of Black citizens, especially the people recently freed from slavery.
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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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An 1865 constitutional amendment that outlawed slavery in the United States except as a punishment for a crime.
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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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Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of freedom for enslaved people living in Confederate-controlled areas on January 1, 1863.