8.6The nadir of race relations

For Black Americans, especially in the South, these decades marked a brutal retreat from the promise of Reconstruction. Southern states imposed "Jim Crow" laws mandating racial segregation and used poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright terror to strip Black citizens of the vote guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment.

In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court blessed segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal," giving legal cover to systematic inequality. Lynching claimed thousands of Black lives, terrorizing communities into submission. Leaders debated how to respond, from Booker T. Washington's emphasis on economic self-help to demands for full civil and political rights. The constitutional amendments endured, but their meaning had been hollowed out.