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A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States of America End of Reconstruction |
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This effort to have the United States Government protect black rights in the South received a major setback in 1876. In the presidential election that year (the famous Tilden-Hayes contested election), the Republicans garnered the necessary electoral votes to elect Rutherford B. Hayes by agreeing to remove all Union troops from the southern United States. As Republican fortunes continued to wane in the late 1870s and the 1880s, the Republican Party became less and less interested in protecting black civil rights in the South and more and more interested in winning white votes anywhere they could be found. This problem was further complicated by the fact that the more "civil rights oriented" Republicans of the Civil War period, those most committed to the cause of the recently freed slaves, were growing old and retiring from active politics. The younger members of the Grand Old Party simply did not share their deep devotion to protecting black civil rights in the South.
The nationalization of black civil rights came to a complete end in 1892 when the Democrats gained control of the presidency and both houses of Congress for the first time since the Civil War. By 1894 this Democratic Congress had succeeded in repealing most of the civil rights laws that had been enacted during the post-Civil War period, most importantly the provisions that had to do with voting rights.
This wholesale removal of protections left the black citizen in the South almost completely at the mercy of southern state governments, and the result was a rash of state laws protecting the right of white citizens to segregate themselves from black citizens in many aspects of social and political life. Southern whites particularly used state law to deny black citizens access to places of "public accommodation," such as restaurants, hotels, and swimming pools, which could be designated by their private owners as "for whites only."
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