Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate
legislation.
The outcome of the American Civil War ended slavery in United States. The Thirteenth Amendment permanently abolished slavery in the United States in
1865. American freedpeople welcomed emancipation but endured continuing hardships because of the prevailing and pervasive racial prejudices of the states
white inhabitants. There is still differentiate between white and black people in America that seen in social life. These two people often assumed each other as
“other”. American’s slavery era were replaced by a postbellum social and legal system of separating citizens on the basis of race that remained intact through the
middle of twentieth century.
3.2 Racial Segregation
After Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870 providing the
right to vote, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 forbidding racial segregation in accommodations, Federal occupation troops in the South assured blacks the right
to vote and to elect their own political leaders. The Reconstruction amendments asserted the supremacy of the national state and the formal equality under the law
of everyone within it. However this radical Reconstruction era would collapse because of multidimensional racialism related to the spread of democratic
idealism. What began as region wide passage of ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws that
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focused on issues of equal access to public activities and facilities would by 1910 have spread throughout the south, mandating the segregation of whites and blacks
in the public sphere. The collapse of the reconstruction amendments and what alluded to racial segregation was also a political move that emerged in the
Southern states.
Racial segregation in the United States, as a general term, included the racial segregation or hypersegregation of facilities, services, and opportunities
such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines. The expression refers primarily to the legally or socially enforced
separation of African Americans from other races, but can more loosely refer to voluntary separation, and also to separation of other racial or ethnic minorities
from the majority mainstream society and communities. The concept of racial segregation was Blacks and whites would be separated in all public
accommodations such as schools, hotels, trains and streetcars, restaurants, and even cemeteries in an effort to underscore the inferiority of blacks.
Racial segregation in the United States has meant the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, but it can also refer to other manifestations of
racial discrimination such as separation of roles within an institution, such as the United States Armed Forces up to the 1950s when black units were typically
separated from white units but were led by white officers.
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Everyone, theoretically, would receive the same public services schools, hospitals, prisons, etc., but that there would be separate distinct facilities for each
race. In practice, the services and facilities reserved for African-Americans were almost always of lower quality than those reserved for whites; for example, most
African-American schools received less public funding per student than nearby white schools. Segregation was never mandated by law in the northern states, but
a de facto system grew up for schools, in which nearly all black students attended schools that were nearly all-black. In the South, white schools had zero
blacks and no black teachers, while the black schools had black teachers and no white students.
The rise of segregation in the South came as it did in the North with the development of the most advanced technologies of the day–the railroad. Once
segregation began, it was difficult to stop. Segregated cars, then depots, water fountains, bathrooms, beaches, pools, lunch counters, voting booths, and the
others. Like a cancer it metastasized, moving silently into unexpected places. By the 1950s segregation had become deeply entrenched in the South, a pattern of
thinking and behavior, a wall of racial categories and divisions, a series of daily practices enacted with such consistency that few could comprehend how to
challenge them. Moreover, Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist group did racist actions
that culminated in 1950-1960s decade. Ku Klux Klan is known as an extrem racist clan in USA created on December 24 1985 after civil war. This clan assumed that
white people is the best clan in America an the only one clan owning the America.
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The Ku Klux Klan started after the Civil War with a group of white Southerners who were very angry when the war ended. They were angry because the Blacks
had won their freedom from slavery and they had lost their slaves. No more slavery meant their lives had changed and they felt threatened. In this first Ku
Klux Klan period, another their purpose to do violence worked to suppress black voting. More than 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in
Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071,
after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for Grants opponent. The Ku Klux Klan members
killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried
pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The Ku Klux Klan made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact Du Bois, W.E.B, 680-681 .
Back to the racist action they did in 1950-1960s, there were so many racist actions against black people. Beginning in the 1950s, individual Ku Klux Klan
groups in Birmingham, Alabama, where the story of To Kill A mockingbird took place began to resist social change and black people improving their lives by
bombing houses in transitional neighborhoods. There were so many bombings in Birmingham of black people’s homes by this Klan
.
In some cases they used physical violence, intimidation and assassination directly against individuals.
Many murders went unreported by local and state authorities.
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Among the more notorious murders by Klan members:
•
The 1951 Christmas Eve bombing of the home of NAACP activists Harry and Harriette Moore in Mims, Florida, resulting in their deaths.
•
The 1957 murder of Willie Edwards, Jr. Klansmen forced Edwards to jump to his death from a bridge into the Alabama River.
•
The 1963 assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi. In 1994, former Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was convicted.
•
The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four African-American girls. The perpetrators were
Klan members Robert Chambliss, convicted in 1977, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted in 2001 and 2002. The fourth suspect,
Herman Cash, died before he was indicted.
•
The 1964 murders of three civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi. In June 2005, Klan member Edgar Ray Killen
was convicted of manslaughter.
•
The 1964 murder of two black teenagers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in Mississippi. In August 2007, based on the
confession of Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards, James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted. Seale was sentenced to serve
three life sentences. Seale was a former Mississippi policeman and sheriffs deputy.
•
The 1965 Alabama murder of Viola Liuzzo. She was a Southern-raised Detroit mother of five who was visiting the state in order to attend a civil
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rights march. At the time of her murder Liuzzo was transporting Civil Rights Marchers.
•
The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., 58, in Mississippi. In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Sam Bowers was
convicted of his murder and sentenced to life. Two other Klan members were indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial, and the others
indictment was dismissed.
3.3 Civil Right Movement
