Rights Taken Away

What children learn in Level 75

• Rights written in the Constitution still had to be protected. Right after the war, Southern states passed Black Codes. These laws limited where freed people could work and travel. A Black worker without a job could be arrested and forced to work.
• Congress pushed back, and it sent the army to the South. For a time, Black men voted in huge numbers, and Black lawmakers took office across the South.
• In 1868, Georgia voters elected 33 Black lawmakers. Then white lawmakers voted to expel nearly all of them, because of their race. Henry McNeal Turner stood up in the Georgia House and demanded his rights. In 1870, they got their seats back.
• Others turned to violence. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan threatened and attacked Black voters and their white allies, and burned schools. Many people were too afraid to vote.
• Voting rules did the rest. A poll tax was a fee to vote. A literacy test was a reading test, often graded unfairly. A grandfather clause excused many white men. On paper these rules rarely named race, yet they kept most Black men from voting.
• The 13th Amendment had a gap too: forced work was still allowed as punishment for a crime. States arrested Black men for small things and rented them out as workers. By 1877, the last soldiers protecting Reconstruction governments had left the South. The rights were still in the Constitution, but they were not being protected.