Reconstruction Era Terms and Amendments

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Black Codes

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Laws enacted in 1865 and 1866 in the former Confederate states to restrict freedom and opportunities for African Americans.

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Fifteenth Amendment

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A constitutional change ratified in 1870 granting Black men the right to vote.

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Fourteenth Amendment

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A constitutional change ratified in 1868 granting citizenship to all formerly enslaved people by declaring that anyone born in the United States is a citizen; extended the rights of due process of law and equal protection under the law to Black people.

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Freedmen’s Bureau

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A federal agency established in 1865, at the end of the Civil War, to help and protect the 4 million newly freed African Americans as they transitioned out of enslavement.

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Jim Crow laws

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Any of the laws legalizing racial segregation of Black people and White people that were enacted in Southern states beginning in the 1880s and enforced through the 1950s.

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Ku Klux Klan

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Established in 1866, a secret, White supremacist terrorist group that resisted Reconstruction by harassing, threatening, and using violence against Black people.

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Plessy v. Ferguson

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The 1896 Supreme Court case that established the controversial 'separate but equal' doctrine by which segregation became legal as long as the facilities provided to Black people were equivalent to those provided to White people.

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Radical Republicans

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During and after the Civil War, a member of the Republican Party who believed in and fought for the emancipation of enslaved people and, later, the equal rights of African Americans.

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Thirteenth Amendment

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A constitutional change ratified in 1865 abolishing slavery in the United States.