1865

The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution abolishes slavery.

1866

Fisk University is founded in Nashville. Pictured below is the university when it was founded versus contemporary times.

1868

Hampton Normal and Agricultural School, later renamed Hampton Institute and then Hampton University, is founded in Hampton, Virginia.

The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution provides equal protection to all citizens, and grants citizenship to everyone born in the United States.

1869

Sarah Hopkins Bradford brings Harriett Tubman to the nation’s attention by publishing Scenes in the Life of Harriett Tubman.

1870

The fifteenth amendment to the Constitution provides voting rights to all male citizens by prohibiting states and the national government from denying anyone the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

But the passage also generates resentment and reprisals directed at black citizens–reprisals that will continue for years.

1873

Harvard-educated Richard T. Greener (1844-1922) becomes the first black professor at the University of South Carolina.

1874

During the so-called “Battle of Liberty Place” in New Orleans (essentially a riot on behalf of the White League), a gang of ex-Confederate soldiers seeks to oust Louisiana’s Republican governor and its black lieutenant governor. General James Longstreet, who served under General Lee, intervenes to help put down the riot to restore the elected government.

1875

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 guarantees equal treatment to all Americans, regardless of race, when it comes to public accommodations such as railroads, restaurants, and hotels. (But in 1883, the act is declared unconstitutional, a ruling which held until the Court reversed itself in the mid-1960s.)

1881

Tuskegee Normal School, later known as Tuskegee Institute, is founded on July 4, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington.

1883

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 is declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The ruling offers a path to the invention of Jim Crow legislation. Soon interracial marriage and the education of Negroes are forbidden in many parts of the South. Black and white citizens are also forbidden to play together, attend theatres and restaurants together,  even to be buried in the same cemeteries.

1884

Interventions by baseball star Adrian “Cap” Anson result in the banning of black players from so-called Organized Baseball, a ban that would persist until 1946.

Ida B. Wells refuses to give up her seat during a train trip.

Shown below is the home of Ida B Wells in Holly Springs, Mississippi, as pictured in 2018.

1886

The Supreme Court rules, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, that San Franciscans could not discriminate against Chinese laundry workers.

1889

Ida B. Wells becomes co-owner and editor of the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in Memphis, a platform for the anti-lynching campaign she would wage in the coming years.

1892

When three of her close friends are lynched in Memphis, Ida B. Wells begins her decades-long anti-lynching crusade. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases appears on October 26.

Anna Julia Cooper publishes her A Voice from the South.

1893

Angered by the institution of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth century South, Rev. Henry McNeil Turner begins to support black nationalism and emigration of blacks to Africa. (He also supported the prohibition of alcohol and the women’s suffrage movement.)

February 13:

Ida B. Wells speaks on “Lynch Law” before an all-white audience in Boston.

1894

Richard T. Greener publishes “The White Problem,” which redefines “the black problem.”

1895

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin convenes the First National Conference of the Colored Women of America.

The National Federation of Afro-American Women is founded. Harriett Tubman is the keynote speaker at the first gathering.

Hallie Quinn Brown speaks at a Women’s Christian Temperance Union meeting in London. For the next two years she speaks often in England about the evils of Jim Crow.

February 20:

The death of Frederick Douglass.

September 18:

Booker T. Washington offers his “Atlanta Compromise” speech. For more information on this speech, consult the Voices of Democracy entry on it here.