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Racial Caste System
The period from the end of the American Civil War in 1865 until 1877. During Reconstruction, the United States was reunited under a single federal government, which abolished slavery and extended civil rights to African Americans. In many states, African Americans served in government, and this was arguably the most residentially integrated period of American history. However, a wave of white supremacist terrorism in the South brought Reconstruction to an end: by murdering and intimidating African Americans to prevent them from voting, white terrorist militias like the Red Shirts guaranteed the election of all-white governments, which then passed segregationist policies and deprived African Americans of the civil rights they had so recently won. These policies perpetuated the American system of racial caste for the next century and set in place the norms of residential segregation that federal and local governments, in addition to government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration, bitterly defended throughout the 20th century.
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Reconstruction Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Reconstruction appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3: Racial Zoning
...peaked in 1880. In Part I of this chapter, Rothstein explains how the end of Reconstruction in 1877 led to widespread segregation in the South, in part through a variety of...
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The backlash to Reconstruction, Rothstein argues in Part III, did not even spare the federal government: the virulently racist...
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Chapter 4: “Own Your Own Home”
...of housing discrimination, as he has analyzed it so far: after “the violent suppression of Reconstruction,” explicit racial segregation was the norm until the Supreme Court outlawed it in 1917, and...
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