Blacks who returned to the post-war South met with radical Reconstruction policies, designed to destroy the previous white power structure. White Southerners tried to regain control in various ways. On Christmas Eve of 1865, six young Confederate veterans started a social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, to protect white people from humiliation by Negroes. Soon, as blacks began to be elected to legislative offices, the Tennessee group became a political organization known as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), with the purpose of reasserting white supremacy.
A similar group in 1867, the Knights of the White Camellia, sprang up in New Orleans, Louisiana. In that same year, Grand Wizard of the KKK, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, developed an organizational plan that aimed to scare superstitious blacks from their homes by wearing "ghostly" white costumes. Soon, angry mobs lynched innocent Negroes, which produced an outcry from other less violent whites. Although the hateful group was officially disbanded in 1869, local mobs continued for decades. Two years later, the Grand Jury finally investigated reports of lynchings and blacks being burned out of their homes, churches, and schools in South Carolina, and the U.S. Circuit court made a small effort to stop the attacks.
Plantation life of former slaves changed little. They still performed the same duties for white owners. Nearly ten years after the war, older male Negroes males were still being called uncle. Most Negroes remained courteous to whites out of habit, but stole their poultry, bacon and other commodities. White overseers, often referred to by former slaves as Colonel or Cunnel, usually hired Negro laborers for ten to sixteen dollars a month. Some planters offered share-cropping, but most Negroes preferred wages in order to buy expensive whiskey and food delicacies from the planters' stores on Saturday nights, which left them constantly without cash until the next payday.
While blacks were now enfranchised, southern whites would not hire them unless they agreed not to exercise their right to vote. If they caught them voting, they fired them. In 1877, when Federal troops were removed from the South, the Republican Party abandoned the ex-slaves, which ended any protection at all for them, legal or otherwise. Blacks either moved North or West, or remained in the South as laborers or tenant farmers, very few becoming land owners.
In the latter 1860s, the entire country experienced a tremendous growth of railroads and urbanization. The influx of foreigners fanned the fires of racial prejudice, not only toward blacks but toward "Orientals," "Indians," and other ethnicities as well. In 1875, a Civil Rights Act was passed that mandated equal access to public accommodations, but was declared unconstitutional in 1883. Political interest in Reconstruction ended. As factories began to appear everywhere, labor issues thrust themselves to the forefront of national consciousness.
Black people continued to gain a small measure of political prestige in the North. Some had been elected to Congress and, in 1876, Mister Blanche Bruce became a U.S. Senator. As early as 1869, Isaac Myers of the Colored Caulkers' Trades' Society made a plea for unity between white and Negro factory workers, and soon became president of the Negro National Labor Union. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass became renowned as a spokesman for "the colored man." Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute, recommended that the Negro obtain industrial training and continue to accommodate whites, claiming that blacks wanted responsibilities, not rights. It was not until 1903 that W. E. B. Du Bois demanded equal economic and social status for Negroes.
Between 1884 and 1900, two-and-a-half thousand lynchings occurred in the United States, mostly in the South, along with the end of black voting rights there. At the turn of the century, during President McKinley's administration, it became an unwritten law that Northern politicians, both Democrat and Republican, were not to interfere with local politics, leaving the Negro totally at the mercy of white bigots.
Most avenues of social and economic improvement still remained closed to blacks. Those who relocated to Canada did not fare much better, although there were isolated incidences of educated Negroes becoming wealthy in real estate or business there. Not until mid-twentieth century were black people finally able to unite behind one Lincolnesque leader, the martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., and begin to win the true freedom they had been promised, but denied, for over a hundred years. Today, while most white people present a facade of "political correctness," age-old prejudices may linger in their hearts, especially in the elderly population, and African-Americans sometimes still struggle to be judged, not by the color of their skins, but by the color of their individual characters.