The National Association of Colored People (NAACP) was born on February 12, 1909, on the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. It was founded by a small group of 60 white and black activists who had been shocked by a race riot that exploded in Springfield, Illinois — the city in which Lincoln had practiced law — the year before.  Read More →

The Republican Party was officially formed in July 1854 in Jackson, Michigan when a group of men who belonged to various splinter parties met and adopted the name Republican. The name appealed to those who recalled Jeffersonian “republicanism” and generally placed the national interest above sectional interest and above states’ rights. The party’s founders totally opposed slavery.... 

The Ku Klux Klan was formed as a social club by a group of Confederate Army veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee in the winter of 1865-66. The group adopted the name Ku Klux Klan from the Greek  Read More →

The Fourteenth Amendment was one of three amendments to the Constitution adopted after the Civil War to guarantee black rights. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth granted citizenship to people once enslaved, and the Fifteenth guaranteed black men the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed by Congress in June 1866 and ratified by the states in 1868. ... 

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was created by Congress in March 1865 to assist for one year in the transition from slavery to freedom in the South. The Bureau was given “the supervision and management of all abandoned lands, and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen, under such rules and regulations as may be presented by the head of the Bureau and... 

The Democratic Party was formed in 1792, when supporters of Thomas Jefferson began using the name Republicans, or Jeffersonian Republicans, to emphasize its anti-aristocratic policies. It adopted its present name during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. In the 1840s and ’50s, the party was in conflict over extending slavery to the Western territories. Southern Democrats insisted... 

“Jim Crow,” a minstrel character popular during the early 1820s, is the namesake of an American system of discrimination and segregation. The Black Codes of the Reconstruction era and railroad segregation laws foreshadowed the birth of the system of Jim Crow, but the Compromise of 1877 can be considered the political event that allowed Jim Crow to come into full power. ... 

In 1875, the lame-duck Republican-controlled Congress, in a last-ditch effort to protect what remained of Reconstruction, managed to pass a civil-rights bill that sought to guarantee freedom of access, regardless of race, to the “full and equal enjoyment” of many public facilities. Citizens were given the right to sue for personal damages. The two key clauses read as follows: ... 

Early in the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was hard pressed by the Radical Republicans — the party’s abolitionist wing — to abolish slavery by proclamation. Lincoln was opposed. He said that his main concern was preserving the union and he subordinated his feelings  Read More →

Between 1870 and 1871 Congress passed the Enforcement Acts — criminal codes that protected blacks’ right to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws. If the states failed to act, the laws allowed the federal government to intervene. The target of the acts was the Ku Klux Klan, whose members were murdering many blacks and some whites because they voted, held...