The Great Betrayal

White northerners lost the political momentum to keep reconstruction going. The south fought a military insurgency characterized by para military guerilla groups like the cuklux clan. White southerners fought hard to resist the idea of african american equality and enfranchisement in the social sphere, in the economic sphere and in the political sphere. To get there, the supreme court had to bless and validate laws that effectively repudiated the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. Segregation, the principle of separate but equal violated the fourteenth amendment, but the supreme court pretended otherwise in the tragically awful case of ples v ferguson. Similarly, laws designed to block africans from