1868

The fourteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified. It gives all native born and naturalized persons citizenship and gives blacks equal protection under the law.

Congress passes a fourth Reconstruction Act.

President Johnson is impeached by the House of Representatives. He avoids removal from office by a narrow vote in the Senate.

South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, followed by Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Louisiana, are readmitted to the Union and allowed representation in Congress.

In South Carolina the first and only American legislature made up of a black majority is elected. The ratio of black to white representatives is 87:40.

African-American representatives are expelled from the Georgia legislature. It takes them a year to gain re-admittance.

In Louisiana, 200-300 African Americans are killed in the Opelousas Massacre.

White voters in Iowa pass a referendum granting the franchise to black voters.

The Klu Klux Klan evolves into a hooded terrorist organization known to its members as The Invisible Empire of the South. An early influential Klan Grand Wizard is Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a Confederate general during the Civil War.

Some experts have argued that Reconstruction laid the foundation for the organization of new segregated institutions, white supremacist ideologies, legal rationalizations, extra-legal violence and everyday racial terror – further widening the racial divide among blacks and whites. Others have pointed out that the end of the war left black Americans free but their status undetermined, with the passing of codes to prevent black people from being truly free. But eventually, under the 14th amendment, African American men were granted the right to vote.