Question

What happened in the south soon after reconstruction ended

Answer 1

While blacks gained freedom in the South, they hardly gained equality. Despite the Radical Republicans’ efforts at Reconstruction, many blacks in the South struggled with poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment. As Reconstruction waned, the condition of freedmen worsened. The Freedmen’s Bureau closed, voting restrictions such as poll taxes and literacy tests proliferated, and racist violence spread. Discrimination in the South further intensified with the passage of Jim Crow laws in the 1880s. Jim Crow laws segregated many public accommodations such as trains, steamboats, streetcars, and schools, and restricted or forbade black access to other facilities, like theaters and restaurants. The Supreme Court upheld such segregation in its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), which declared all “separate but equal” facilities to be constitutional. This decision cleared the way for decades of demoralizing discrimination against blacks.