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An 1868 constitutional amendment removing racial restrictions on citizenship and mandating equal justice before the law.
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Promoted the settlement of formerly enslaved people in the American colony of Liberia, in West Africa.
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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.
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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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Organizations established by former abolitionists to aid formerly enslaved people, one of which provide food and medical supplies to the Exodusters in Kansas.
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The practice of a tenant farming the landlord’s ground for a share of the crop, sold when the harvest came in. This was the only available form of employment to many formerly enslaved people in the post–Civil War South and became a way of maintaining wealthy white power, ensuring Black indebtedness and dependence on white landowners.
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The separation of Black and white people into separate racial groups in daily life.
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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.
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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.