Civil rights movement in the United States - Nature and characteristics of discrimination

The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865 at the close of the American Civil War, formally abolished slavery throughout the United States. It reads that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States." This built directly on President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (1863), which had freed enslaved people only in Confederate-held territory and had shifted the Union's war aims to include abolition. The 13th Amendment went further: it applied nationwide, ending slavery even in border states that had remained loyal to the Union and had not been covered by the Proclamation.

This background is important context for understanding the nature and characteristics of discrimination that the Civil Rights Movement later confronted, but the amendment itself belongs to the constitutional foundation laid in the second half of the 19th century, well before the 1954-1964 period that is the focus of this Paper 1 case study.

The 13th Amendment was the first of three Reconstruction Amendments passed in quick succession:

• 13th Amendment (1865): abolished slavery
• 14th Amendment (1868): granted citizenship and equal protection under the law
• 15th Amendment (1870): secured voting rights regardless of race or former enslavement

Understanding how a constitutional amendment becomes law helps explain why these three amendments carried such legal weight. Amendments must be proposed either by a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, or by a constitutional convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures. To take effect, an amendment must then be ratified by three-fourths of the states. That the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments cleared this high bar shows there was, at the time, significant political consensus behind formally ending slavery and extending citizenship rights.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, was one of three Reconstruction amendments added to the US Constitution in the aftermath of the Civil War, alongside the 13th Amendment (1865, abolishing slavery) and the 15th Amendment (1870, securing voting rights regardless of race). Its significance for the civil rights movement lies less in its original wording, which was expansive, and more in how narrowly the Supreme Court chose to interpret it over the following decades.

The amendment did two crucial things. First, it granted birthright citizenship, overturning the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which had denied that African Americans could be US citizens. Second, it contained the Equal Protection Clause, stating that no state shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." It also included a Due Process Clause, prohibiting states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. On paper, this constitutionalized citizenship and equality for the four million formerly enslaved people freed by the 13th Amendment.

The problem was never really the text of the amendment -- it was enforcement. As long as federal troops occupied the South during Reconstruction, the Equal Protection Clause had some teeth. But the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, marking the end of Reconstruction, removed the mechanism that had been giving the amendment practical force. Southern state legislatures, now free of federal oversight, began passing Jim Crow laws that segregated public life and disenfranchised African American voters -- precisely the kind of state action the 14th Amendment was supposed to prevent.

The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, was the third of the Reconstruction Amendments following the 13th (1865, abolishing slavery) and 14th (1868, granting citizenship and equal protection). It stated that the right to vote could not be denied or abridged "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" -- explicitly protecting formerly enslaved men's access to the ballot. Passing a constitutional amendment required a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states, so the amendment represented a genuine, hard-won national consensus in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

However, the amendment only prohibited denying the vote explicitly because of race -- it said nothing about supposedly race-neutral barriers like literacy or property qualifications. This narrow wording created a legal loophole that Southern states exploited once federal enforcement weakened.

With the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, political will to enforce the 15th Amendment collapsed. Southern white elites used violence, intimidation, and election fraud to suppress Black voting, while the Enforcement Acts (1870-71) -- originally passed to give the amendment teeth -- were gutted by hostile Supreme Court rulings such as United States v. Cruikshank (1876) and U.S. v. Reese (1875). These decisions reduced federal power to prosecute individuals or officials for civil rights violations, effectively leaving enforcement of the 15th Amendment to the same Southern state governments determined to circumvent it.

As background to the post-1954 case study, it is essential to understand how the basis of systemic racism in the United States was built in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1866, the US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, a direct legislative response to the abolition of slavery and to the Southern Black Codes -- state laws that had begun restricting the freedoms of newly emancipated African Americans immediately after the Civil War. The Act was intended to give legal substance to the freedom promised by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which had abolished slavery but said nothing about the civil status of the formerly enslaved.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 made two major provisions. First, it granted citizenship to all persons born in the United States, with the notable exclusion of Native Americans. Second, it guaranteed that citizens, regardless of race, held equal rights to make contracts, own property, and access the courts on the same terms as white citizens. This was a significant legal innovation: for the first time, federal law explicitly extended the basic legal personhood of citizenship to African Americans, directly countering the logic of the pre-war Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, which had denied that Black Americans could be citizens at all.

Despite the Act's clear language, there was no sustained political will to enforce it. This is the central problem for students to grasp: the failure of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was not primarily a failure of legal drafting, but a failure of political commitment. Three developments illustrate this collapse of enforcement. First, backlash and organised violence against African Americans -- including groups such as the Ku Klux Klan -- undermined the practical exercise of the Act's rights, since a legal right to make contracts or access courts means little if exercising it invites violent retaliation. Second, in 1877, the end of Reconstruction saw federal troops withdrawn from the South as part of a political compromise (the Compromise of 1877), removing the primary mechanism by which federal authority had been enforced on the ground. Third, subsequent Supreme Court rulings progressively weakened the Fourteenth Amendment's protections, permitting Southern states to pass discriminatory laws with little fear of federal intervention.

This pattern -- a rights-granting law undermined by lack of enforcement -- recurs throughout the period covered in this case study and is essential context for understanding why African Americans still needed a mass civil rights movement nearly a century later, despite citizenship and equal legal rights having already been granted on paper in 1866.

After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments (1865, 1868, 1870) had granted formerly enslaved African Americans freedom, citizenship, equal protection, and voting rights regardless of race. The 1866 Civil Rights Act reinforced this, granting citizenship to all persons born in the United States (excluding Native Americans) and guaranteeing equal rights to make contracts, own property, and access courts. On paper, this represented a sweeping legal transformation. In practice, enforcement depended entirely on sustained federal political will -- and on the continued presence of federal troops stationed in the South during Reconstruction (1865-1877) to protect Black citizens against white backlash and violence.

That enforcement mechanism ended in 1877. As part of a political compromise resolving the disputed 1876 presidential election, federal troops were withdrawn from the South, formally ending Reconstruction. This single event removed the federal government's principal tool for protecting African American rights at the local level. Without troops to deter intimidation and violence, and without sustained Congressional or presidential commitment to enforcement, Southern white elites regained control of state governments and began systematically dismantling the gains of Reconstruction.

The consequences unfolded on two fronts. First, the Supreme Court weakened the 14th Amendment through a series of rulings -- including United States v. Cruikshank (1876) and U.S. v. Reese (1875) -- that reduced federal power to prosecute individuals or penalize local officials for civil rights violations, even when the underlying motive was clearly racial. These decisions meant the amendment's promise of equal protection could not be enforced against state and local discrimination. Second, freed from federal oversight, Southern state and local legislatures began enacting Jim Crow laws from the late 1870s onward, using literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and biased registration procedures to disenfranchise Black voters and legally segregate public life -- all while nominally complying with the 15th Amendment's ban on racial discrimination by not naming race explicitly.

The nature of discrimination under Jim Crow rested on a crucial distinction: it was not merely social prejudice, but law. Understanding where these laws came from -- and who wrote them -- is essential background for interpreting any Paper 1 source that references segregation, voting restrictions, or racial violence in the American South.

The roots of Jim Crow lie in the failure of Reconstruction to secure lasting federal protection for the rights granted by the Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments. When federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, marking the formal end of Reconstruction, the political and military pressure that had constrained Southern white elites disappeared. Without federal oversight, state and local legislatures across the South -- dominated entirely by white lawmakers -- began enacting laws that systematically re-established racial hierarchy.

This is the defining characteristic of Jim Crow: it operated through the ordinary machinery of government. Laws were debated, passed, and enforced by state legislatures, city councils, and local officials, giving racial discrimination the appearance of legitimate, codified authority rather than mere custom or private prejudice.

Two structural factors explain why state and local legislatures -- rather than Congress or the federal courts -- became the primary engine of discrimination:

1. Federal retreat. After 1877, federal authorities largely avoided intervening in Southern civil rights violations, and political alliances between Northern and Southern white Democrats discouraged renewed federal action. This left states with wide latitude to regulate racial matters as they saw fit.
2. Supreme Court legitimization. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the doctrine of "separate but equal," giving Jim Crow laws constitutional cover. Once the Supreme Court ruled that segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, state legislatures faced no meaningful judicial check on how far they extended segregation into daily life -- schools, transport, restrooms, and drinking fountains all fell within this expanding legal framework.

Jim Crow laws also worked alongside methods of disenfranchisement -- poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses -- passed by these same state legislatures to strip African Americans of the vote despite the Fifteenth Amendment's guarantees. Segregation and disenfranchisement were therefore two branches of the same legislative project: using the formal powers of state government to entrench white supremacy after the promises of Reconstruction had gone unfulfilled.

It is worth noting that this legislative process unfolded gradually from the late 1870s through the early twentieth century, hardening into the fully developed system that the Civil Rights Movement confronted from 1954 onward -- the period this Paper 1 prescribed subject focuses on. The nineteenth-century origins discussed here provide essential background for understanding why legal challenges, rather than simple appeals to conscience, were necessary to dismantle Jim Crow.

By the mid-1890s, Southern states had already been passing Jim Crow laws for nearly two decades, segregating trains, schools, and public facilities in the vacuum left by the end of Reconstruction in 1877. What these laws lacked was a definitive ruling from the US Supreme Court confirming they were constitutional. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) supplied exactly that, transforming a patchwork of state-level segregation into a nationally sanctioned constitutional principle.

Homer Plessy, a man classified as one-eighth Black under Louisiana law, deliberately boarded a 'whites-only' railway carriage in 1892 to challenge Louisiana's Separate Car Act. He was arrested, and his case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 7-1 that racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection, provided that the separate facilities provided were equal in quality. This became known as the "separate but equal" doctrine. The ruling gave state-level Jim Crow segregation constitutional cover for close to 60 years, until it was overturned in the field of education by Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

After the Civil War, formerly enslaved African Americans gained legal freedom but overwhelmingly lacked land, capital, tools, or credit. In the absence of Reconstruction-era land redistribution, most freedpeople in the rural South had no realistic alternative but to work the land of white landowners under new, exploitative arrangements. Sharecropping emerged as the dominant system: a landless farmer (the sharecropper) worked a plot of land owned by a white landlord in exchange for a

share of the crop produced -- typically half, after the landlord deducted costs for seed, tools, housing, and other supplies advanced during the growing season. On paper, sharecropping looked like a contractual, voluntary arrangement between two parties. In practice, it was structured to keep African American families perpetually indebted and immobile, functioning as a key economic pillar of the Jim Crow system alongside legal segregation and disenfranchisement.

Debt peonage was the coercive mechanism that made sharecropping inescapable. Landlords and merchants controlled the accounting: they set prices for supplies advanced on credit, weighed and valued the harvested crop, and calculated the sharecropper's earnings -- all without independent oversight. Because Black sharecroppers had little legal recourse (Southern courts, juries, and law enforcement were controlled by white officials), landlords could manipulate the books so that a family's debt to the landlord or plantation store never shrank, no matter how hard they worked. Some Southern states passed peonage laws and vagrancy statutes that criminalized leaving a debt unpaid, meaning a sharecropper who tried to leave for a better arrangement, or simply to escape exploitation, could be legally forced back into labour or imprisoned. This created conditions the source material explicitly describes as "resembling slavery" -- workers bound to the land not by legal ownership, but by manufactured, inescapable debt.

Sharecropping and debt peonage should be understood as part of a wider Jim Crow economic architecture. Southern states also profited from convict leasing, forcing Black prisoners -- often arrested on minor or fabricated charges -- into agricultural and industrial labour, and even Northern companies such as US Steel benefited from this system despite their public claims to abolitionist principles. Together, these systems show that the end of legal slavery in 1865 did not end economic bondage: white Southern elites redesigned coercive labour control to fit within the letter of the 13th Amendment while violating its spirit.