Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed slaves into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive "black codes" to control the labor and behavior of former slaves and other African Americans.

If the nonviolence of the Southern Freedom/Civil Rights Movement frightened mainstream people in the U.S., the Black Power movement confronted institutional racism with a youthful boldness and fearlessness unseen since enslaved Africans took up arms in the Civil War. In this section, important "founding documents" of the Black Power movement are examined. In addition, the section explores the impact of Black Power on other oppressed peoples in the United States.

Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel enslavement, primarily of Africans and African Americans, that existed in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From early colonial days, it was practiced in Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies which formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property and could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until 1865. As an economic system, slavery was largely replaced by sharecropping and convict leasing.

At the outset of the Civil War, to the dismay of the more radical abolitionists in the North, President Abraham Lincoln did not make the abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort. To do so, he feared, would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the summer of 1862, however, the slaves themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln's troops marched through the South. Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the "peculiar institution"-that many slaves were truly content in bondage-and convinced Lincoln that emancipation had become a political and military necessity. In response to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which freed more than 3 million slaves in the Confederate states by January 1, 1863, blacks enlisted in the Union Army in large numbers, reaching some 180,000 by war's end.

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. These laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Southern Democrat-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by black people during the Reconstruction period. The Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965.

Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark decision n U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. This is where your text starts. You can click here to start 

The civil rights movement in the United States was a decades-long struggle by African Americans and their like-minded allies to end institutionalized racial discrimination, disenfranchisement and racial segregation in the United States.

These challenges faced by the first students to desegregate Southern schools, such as racism, verbal harassment, and physical threats. They will hear oral histories telling the story of desegregation pioneers in Alabama and North Carolina, and critically analyze images of school desegregationHarriet Ann Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North. 

The Culture and Change: Black History in America student activity offers an in-depth look into the African American experience, featuring interviews, historical sketches, and interactive activities. Students learn about African Americans who've made a difference, study the civil rights movement and the concept of racism, and explore the history of jazz music. The various parts of this activity can be used together or independently.

A preponderance of African American cultural expressions in the first half of the 20th-century focus on the oppressive conditions of the Jim Crow South attempts to escape this climate by migrating North, and myth versus reality of life in the North. These themes cut across African American literature, music, and art. This lesson specifically explores how the lives and work of blues musicians and African Americans intersected and complemented one another.

Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa. Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa in ancient times, as they were in much of the rest of the ancient world. When the Arab slave trade and Atlantic slave trade began, many of the pre-existing local African slave systems began supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa.

‏‏‎Established by Congress in 1966, the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail commemorates the people, events, and route of the 1965 Voting Rights March in Alabama. Led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Black and White's non-violent supporters fought for the right to vote in Central Alabama. Today, you can connect with this history and trace the events of these marches along the 54-mile trail.