Page "Politics of the Southern United States" Paragraph 6

A reaction to the defeat and changes in society began immediately, with vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan arising in 1866 as the first line of insurgents.

They attacked and killed both freedmen and their white allies.

Most men in the South were veterans of the war, so it was not surprising that resistance became violent.

By the 1870s, more organized paramilitary groups, such as the White League and Red Shirts, took part in turning Republicans out of office and barring or intimidating blacks from voting.

White Democrats regained power by the late 1870s, and began to pass laws to restrict black voting in a period they came to refer to as Redemption.

From 1890 – 1908 states of the former Confederacy passed statutes and amendments to their state constitutions that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites in the South through devices such as residency requirements, poll taxes, and literacy tests.

At the same time states passed Jim Crow laws to create legal racial segregation in public facilities and services ; the phrase separate but equal, upheld in the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, came to represent the notion that whites and blacks should have access to physically separate but ostensibly equal facilities.

It would not be until 1954 that Plessy was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education, and only in the late 1960s was segregation fully repealed by legislation passed following the American Civil Rights Movement.