51����

The full course notes for the international a-level history Edexcel paper 3 on the civil rights and race relations in the USA from 1865-2009. The notes go into heavy detail based on the exam boards specification:
1 ‘Free at last’, 1865-77

• Reasons for, and impact of, the Thirteenth Amendment
  1865-77: the significance of the changed economic position of ex-slaves and the development of sharecropping; freedom of movement; the significance of the social and educational opportunities of freedom and increased social tensions; the need for a political settlement and President Andrew Johnson’s response.
• Northern radicals and ‘Radical Reconstruction’ 1867-77: the impact of military rule in the south; the significance of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Act 1875; significance of the presence of black representatives in federal and state legislatures.
• The backlash: the impact of the Ku Klux Klan and White League, including the incidence of lynching; the impact of the restoration of Democrat control in the south and the end of Reconstruction 1877.
  2 The triumph of ‘Jim Crow’, 1883- с1900
• The role of the Supreme Court: impact of the civil rights cases 1883; the impact of Plessy V Ferguson 1896, Williams v Mississippi 1898 and Cumming v Richmond County Board of Education 1899.
• The spread of Jim Crow Laws and the impact of pressure groups in the south: changes to rail travel in Florida 1887; extension of segregation to other social areas and other states; the impact of new laws on educational and economic opportunities for black Americans, including the drift to the north and west. Booker T Washington and the black response to segregation.
• Excluding black voters: the impact of discrimination in Mississippi from 1890; the impact of Louisiana’s Grandfather Clause 1898; the general impact on voting opportunities in the south of similar discriminations by the early 20th century.