1
Jim Crow South
Thirteenth Amendment:
This 1865 constitutional
amendment abolished
slavery in the United
States.
Fourteenth Amendment:
This 1868 constitutional
amendment made blacks
citizens and guaranteed
them ‘equal protection
of the laws.’
Fifteenth Amendment:
This 1870 constitutional
amendment prohibited
racial discrimination in
voting.
Mississippi Plan: The
violent restoration of sou-
thern white governments
after Reconstruction.
Ku Klux Klan: A white ter-
rorist organization against
integration.F
or a few years after the Civil War ended in 1865, it looked as if
four million blacks would enter the mainstream of society. In what
amounted to a revolution in black status, the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendmentsto the Constitution ended slavery, promised ‘equal protection
of the laws’ to both races, and granted suffrage to black males [Doc. 1,
p. 140]. Congress used this authority to enact the nation’s first civil rights
laws, recognizing blacks as citizens with inviolable rights, prohibiting racial
violence, and opening public accommodations and conveyances to all. As a
consequence, many former slaves legalized their marriages, moved about
without passes, attended school, testified in court, voted and held political
office, and decided for whom and how long they wished to work.
To redeem the South from this ‘nigger domination,’ whites terrorized and
slaughtered blacks in what was called the Mississippi Plan. Vigilante
groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, castrated, raped, and lynchedthousands
of black men and women. In 1899, near Atlanta, Georgia, Sam Hose was
accused of murdering his employer, Alfred Cranford, and raping Cranford’s
wife. Two thousand whites took the law into their own hands and disrobed
‘this monster in human form,’ chained him to a tree, cut off his ears, fingers,
and genitals, skinned his face, and plunged knives into his body before set-
ting him ablaze. As his eyes bulged from their sockets and his blood sizzled,
he cried, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.’ The crowd fought over pieces of his heart,
liver, and bones, which were sliced up for prized souvenirs. Although
Cranford’s widow told investigators that Hose killed her husband in self-
defense and had never touched her, a local newspaper defended the
lynchers as ‘intensely religious, home-loving, and just.’ Such sadistic ‘Negro
barbecues’ amused whites and were intended as a grim warning to blacks
never to seek equality. In this nightmare world, a black Mississippian recalled
that ‘to kill a Negro wasn’t nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a
snake. The whites would say, “Niggers jest supposed to die, ain’t no damnLynching: The murder of
3,500 blacks by angry
whites, often by hanging
from trees.