The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil War and Reconstruction saw a radical improvement in the lives of many Black Americans. Slavery was abolished, the Constitution was amended to protect the civil and political rights of former slaves, and southern states elected Black representatives to Congress for the first time in U.S. history. During the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, however, those gains eroded, thanks in part to events in Louisiana. In 1873, a white mob murdered over a hundred Black militiamen in Colfax, Louisiana. This kind of violence became typical throughout the southern U.S. By the 1890s, some estimate that a Black man was lynched every day in the South.

Combined with this violence, the courts curtailed Black civil rights. The most famous cases centered on events in Louisiana. The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), which began in New Orleans, and the Cruikshank Case (1876), which stemmed from the Colfax Massacre, made it easier for states and individual citizens to discriminate based on race. In 1890, Louisiana passed a law segregating train cars. In the ensuing Supreme Court decision over the constitutionality of that law, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the court enshrined the “separate but equal” doctrine. Segregation became legal and southern states rushed to pass discriminatory “Jim Crow” laws. 

LSU Special Collections has a number of sources documenting race relations during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: published works by early civil rights activists and personal papers that discuss racial violence. The National Association for Colored People (or NAACP) was founded in 1909, initially to combat lynching. The library has books published by the NAACP as part of a public awareness campaign about the violence. There are also collections from white families that mention the murder of Black men and women. The Andrew Augustus Gunby papers contain a description of the lynching of a young Black man in Monroe, Louisiana in 1886. Charles Mark and Agatha Faulk Noble Diaries mention the killing of two Black men in 1895. Another notable resource is the Saint Landry Parish Register of Voters in 1895, which includes voter registration documents from African Americans just as new restrictions on their voting rights were being put into place.  

African Americans -- Crimes against.

African Americans – Segregation.

Marshall, Thurgood, 1908-1993.

Lynching.

Riots -- Louisiana.

Segregation.

Southern States -- Race relations.

United Confederate Veterans.

United States -- Race relations.