The New South

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 brought Vice President Andrew Jackson into the White House. Republicans hoped that President Johnson would embrace their effort to reconstruct the defeated south. President Johnson still kept the same racial prejudices most republicans held. Johnson once told a journalist, "White men alone must manage the south". Johnson was against putting freed blacks in control of southern politics. Johnson hoped that middle class white southern unionists along with ex-confederates would take control of restoring the south to the union.

By April 1866, all of the states had fulfilled Johnson’s request of abolishing slavery and voiding all war debts that the states had incurred. Most states put up a fight but still followed the requests. The union victory in the civil war and the official end of slavery created great expectations for freed slaves. Some took new names which represented new identities and new beginnings. Others discarded the clothing provided by their masters and found new styles of dress. Also in 1866, congress passed two important bills designed to aid African Americans. The Civil Rights Act gave full citizenship to African Americans and overturned the 1857 Dred Scott decision. This bill defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens and included various rights such as the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, to give evidence and to buy and sell property. Under this bill, African Americans "acquired full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as it is enjoyed by white citizens." This gave southern African Americans a lot more freedom than they originally received. This bill did not totally change things but definitely took a step in the right direction.
 

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Booker T. Washington believed in what he called the "Atlanta Compromise". This was basically the idea that all black citizens should adopt all the ways of the white middle class. He wanted African Americans to be "industrially educated". He believed that African Americans should focus on self-improvement in order to prepare themselves for equality. He believed that in order to advance as a race, they must improves as a race by white standards. Basically, this "compromise" was an unwritten promise that black people wouldn't challenge segregation.

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Segregation was a big part of the new south. With the enactment of Jim Crow laws, African Americans were forced to use separate facilities from white people, such as bathrooms, drinking fountains, trains, buses, and restaurants. There were two cases that determined how our government felt about segregation in this time period. The first was Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, where a black man named Homer Plessy in Louisiana didn’t want to ride in the train car that was designated for African Americans. The court ruled that “separate but equal” segregation was constitutional. The second case was Cumming v. County Board of Education in 1899, where the court ruled that separate schools for black and white children were constitutional even if schools for black children was not comparable to schools for white children. Rulings such as these allowed Jim Crow laws and segregation to continue up until the Civil Rights Act.

Brinkley, Alan. American History: A Survey. 13th ed. 1. New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 2009. 425-435. Print.