Transcript: Reconstruction Brings White Resistance

NARRATOR: One year later in 1866 Congress recognizing continued Southern resistance to Black emancipation passed the 14th and 15th amendment guaranteeing blacks the right to vote and due process of law. The time of Reconstruction had begun.

NARRATOR: But many whites did not plan on fulfilling the intention of the new laws. Mississippi passed a black code giving courts the right to “apprentice” former slaves, “with preference to their former owners.”

BENJAMIN HUMPHRIES, GOVERNOR OF MISSISSIPPI: The nigra is free whether we like it or not for the purity and progress of both races they must accept their place in the lower order of things. That place is the cotton fields of the south. Such is the rule of the plantation and the law of God.

NARRATOR: But blacks did not see themselves trapped in the cotton fields. They used their vote to elect black representatives, sat on juries and sent their children to school.

LEON LITWACK: What had alarmed the white South during Reconstruction was not evidence of black failure but evidence of black success, evidence of black assertion, evidence of black independence, evidence of black advancement, and evidence that black men were learning the uses of political power.

NARRATOR: If intimidation would not keep blacks in their place, then violence might. In the same year that Reconstruction began, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general founded the Ku Klux Klan. The image of the Klan in white hoods killing blacks by the light of burning crosses would forever be etched in the American mind.

NELL IRVIN PAINTER: The way white supremacists made sure that ex-slaves would fall back into place or nearly back into place was terror.