Robert Smalls was elected to Congress from South Carolina during Reconstruction.
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Deadly election “riots” took place in Barbour County, Alabama against African American politicians and voters.
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A group of Confederate veterans in Louisiana formed the White League with the goal of using terrorism to undermine Reconstruction.
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Rep. Robert B. Elliott gave a speech to advocate for the Civil Rights Act, which passed a year later.
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Adelbert Ames become the elected governor of Mississippi during the Reconstruction era.
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Henry E. Hayne was the first Black student to be accepted to the University of South Carolina’s medical school, a bold act which encouraged other Black students to apply. By 1875, Black men comprised the majority of the student body.
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The Ku Klux Klan carried out the Colfax Massacre in response to a Republican victory in the 1872 elections.
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One of the most prominent Black officeholders in Florida during the Reconstruction era, Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs held the positions of Secretary of State and Superintendent of Public Instruction.
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During Reconstruction, Delaware’s Convention of Colored People gathered in Dover to discuss and demand state provisions to educate their children.
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A meeting was held in New York of abolitionists to address the injustice of continued slavery in Cuba.
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P. B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana became the second Black governor in the United States.
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A lynch mob of 500 Anglo and Latino Los Angelinos rioted and murdered at least 17 Chinese residents after a white civilian died in a shootout.
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Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Black educator, baseball player, and civil rights activist Octavius V. Catto was murdered by a white supremacist on election day.
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Elias Thomson, an African American who lived in Spartanburg, South Carolina, bravely shared testimony detailing violence inflicted against him because he voted for the Republican ticket in the local election.
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President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the third of the Enforcement Acts, a Reconstruction-era bill that empowered the federal government to intervene when the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are violated.
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Joseph H. Rainey, from South Carolina, was the first African-American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Reconstruction era protest of racist discrimination on streetcars in Louisville, Kentucky.
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For the first time, African Americans were elected to the House of Representatives in 1870.
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The 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution was formally adopted.
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Wyatt Outlaw, a Union veteran who became the first Black town commissioner of Graham, North Carolina, was seized from his home and lynched by members of the Ku Klux Klan known as the White Brotherhood, which controlled the county.
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Hiram Revels was sworn into office as senator from Mississippi, becoming the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate.
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Hiram Rhodes Revels was the first African American to be elected to serve in the U.S. Senate.
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The first “Redeemer” government is established in Tennessee after conservatives gain control of the state’s General Assembly, ushering in an era of Jim Crow segregation laws.
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The Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of school desegregation in the case of Joseph Workman v. the Detroit Board of Education, almost 90 years before the United States’ landmark Brown v. Board of Education.
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The St. Bernard Parish massacre of African Americans was carried out by white men to terrorize the recently emancipated voters in Louisiana.
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