From the end of the Civil War to World War I, African Americans experienced extraordinary change. In one respect, they went from being enslaved people to citizens, from slavery to freedom, in a complete redefinition of a people. The ratifications of the Thirteenth Amendment (December 1865), which ended slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment (July 1868), which granted citizenship; and the Fifteenth Amendment (February 1870), which granted Black men (but not yet women) the right to vote, radically changed the civic and political status of Black people in an amazingly short period of time.
In addition, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 ensured equal protection under the law, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 banned racial discrimination. Black leaders obtained political office in some Southern states, including sixteen who were elected to Congress, two who served in the U.S. Senate, and two who served briefly as governors during Reconstruction (1865–1877), the period when the United States experimented with being a multiracial democracy.
But if the elevation of Black Americans during Reconstruction was a revolution, it was met by a fierce counterrevolution on the part of white Southerners who vehemently and violently opposed any change in the status of Black people. White Southerners utterly opposed the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency established to help newly freed African Americans obtain fairer wages and better employment conditions from their former enslavers; the bureau also established, in conjunction with the American Missionary Association, some HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). But its main work ended in 1869, and the bureau closed for good in 1872, at which time it had not had nearly enough time to achieve the goal of helping a mostly impoverished people become self-supporting citizens.
