The National Archives states that during the period after Reconstruction, African Americans were denied voting rights and that racial segregation was legalized in Plessy v. Ferguson; it also says thousands of African Americans were "hanged, burned to death, shot to death, tortured, mutilated, and castrated by white mobs" who were almost never prosecuted.

Yet segregation was a social, political, and economic system that placed African Americans in an inferior position, disfranchised them, and was enforced by custom, law, and official and vigilante violence. Movement participants in Mississippi, for example, did not decide beforehand to engage in violence, but self-defense was simply considered common sense.

"However, this amendment was not enough because African Americans were still denied the right to vote by state constitutions and laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, the 'grandfather clause,' and outright intimidation." Voting rights for Black men in former Confederate states "were further restricted by poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and fraud." The page also notes that voting-rights activists in the 1960s "faced violent opposition in the South, both from law enforcement and white residents" including arrests, beatings, killings by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964, and the violent attack on peaceful voting-rights marchers at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.

These white Southern Democrats passed restrictive voter legislation and electoral laws, like poll taxes, which dramatically disenfranchised large swaths of black voters. In addition to racist and discriminatory legislation, intimidation tactics and political violence were used to stop black men from voting. Moreover, white supremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, were established in the south at the end of Reconstruction. These groups used acts of terrorism, such as lynching, to discourage and prevent black men and women from exercising any of their civil rights, and diminished their ability to freely move, act, and participate in society. Many of these violent and discriminatory practices continued into the 19th and 20th centuries.

The system was codified in state and local laws and enforced by intimidation and violence. When the color line was breached, violence was unleashed against offenders by the Ku Klux Klan, often in concert with local law enforcement officials. Lynching and other forms of racial violence and intimidation were routine.

White Americans committed to the myth of Black inferiority used the law and violent terrorism to establish an apartheid society that relegated Black Americans to second-class citizenship and economic exploitation. As racial terror lynching raged throughout the South following the abolition of slavery, the Supreme Court repeatedly rendered the federal government powerless to intervene. During Reconstruction, violence, lynchings, and large scale massacres were used to maintain white control.

The Jim Crow Museum explains that "Black people were denied the right to vote by poll taxes..., white primaries..., and literacy tests" and emphasizes that "The Jim Crow laws and system of etiquette were undergirded by violence, real and threatened." It states that black people who violated Jim Crow norms, "for example, drinking from the white water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, their jobs, even their lives" and that white people "could physically beat black people with impunity" because the criminal justice system was all-white. It concludes: "Violence was instrumental for Jim Crow. It was a method of social control. The most extreme forms of Jim Crow violence were lynchings," used as intimidation to keep Black people "in their places" and to defend white domination.

“Lynchings followed African Americans with the Great Migration… and were often perpetrated to enforce white supremacy and intimidate ethnic minorities along with other acts of racial terrorism… A major motive for lynchings, particularly in the South, was white society’s efforts to maintain white supremacy after the emancipation of enslaved people… Lynchings punished perceived violations of customs, later institutionalized as Jim Crow laws, which mandated racial segregation of Whites and Blacks, and second-class status for Blacks… Lynchings were also (in part) intended as a voter suppression tool. Lynchings to prevent freedmen and their allies from voting and bearing arms were extralegal ways of trying to enforce the previous system of social dominance…

“*Lynching in America* makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. The lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported campaign to enforce racial subordination and segregation… Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized Black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials… Rooted in the need to justify genocide and enslavement, this belief in racial hierarchy survived slavery’s abolition, fueled racial terror lynchings, demanded legally codified segregation…

The KKK employed violence and acts of terror to assert white supremacy and maintain a strict racial hierarchy. During Reconstruction, the Klan used violence and terror in hopes of overthrowing Republican state governments in the South and maintaining the antebellum racial hierarchy.

Mississippi's lawmakers, law enforcement officers, public officials, and private citizens worked long and hard to maintain the segregated way of life that had dominated the state since the end of the Civil War in 1865. The method that ensured segregation persisted was the use and threat of violence against people who sought to end it. In addition to these murders, violence persisted through mass arrests, jail beatings, lynchings, and church bombings.

“Lynching, an act of terror meant to spread fear among blacks, served the broad social purpose of maintaining white supremacy in the economic, social and political spheres… For many African Americans growing up in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries, the threat of lynching was commonplace… With lynching as a violent backdrop in the South, Jim Crow as the law of the land, and the poverty of the sharecropper system, blacks had no recourse. This triage of repression ensured blacks would remain impoverished, endangered, and without rights or hope. Whites could accuse at will and rarely was a white punished for a crime committed against a black.”

“A lynching is the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process… Lynchings were violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South… White mobs often used dubious criminal accusations to justify lynchings… These allegations were used to enforce segregation and advance stereotypes of Black men as violent, hypersexual aggressors… Hundreds of Black people were lynched based on accusations of other crimes… Many victims of lynchings were union organizers, sharecroppers, and civil rights activists who were targeted for challenging white economic or political dominance.”

Violence against Black people increased, with numerous lynchings through the turn of the century. The Jim Crow system employed "terror as a means of social control," with the most organized manifestations being the Ku Klux Klan and their collaborators in local police departments. State and local governments, police, the White Citizens' Council, and the Ku Klux Klan used arrests, beatings, arson, murder, spying, firing, evictions, and other forms of intimidation and harassment to oppose the project and prevent Black people from registering to vote or achieving social equality. This violence played a key role in blocking the civil rights movement's progress in the late 1950s.

The ABH Museum’s overview of voting in the Jim Crow South lists "Violence" as the first of "Eight Ways People Were Kept From Voting." It states: "Blacks who tried to vote were threatened, beaten, and killed. Their families were also harmed. Sometimes their homes were burned down. Often, they lost their jobs or were thrown off their farms. Whites used violence to intimidate blacks and prevent them from even thinking about voting." It notes that some Black people who managed to meet voting requirements were attacked to "punish those 'uppity' people and show other blacks what would happen to them if they voted," illustrating violence as a central tool to block African Americans from exercising voting rights between about 1900 and 1965.

The first Klan emerged during Reconstruction, founded by former Confederate soldiers who opposed federal efforts to extend civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people. It carried out widespread violence against Black voters, officeholders, and their white allies in an effort to undermine Republican state governments and restore white Democratic control in the South.

African Americans, despite facing harsh injustice, organize on a mass scale for equal access to jobs and other rights in the face of widespread violence, with hundreds of African-Americans lynched by white mobs in the early years of the 20th century and race riots led by white racists decimate African-American communities in a number of cities across the country. Despite volunteer dedication VEP enjoyed little success: progress was slow and marked by violence against rights workers, including murders.

The University of Iowa’s "History of Voting Rights" notes that after the 15th Amendment, "White southerners intimidated black voters while policy formed roadblocks to voting." It describes Mississippi’s 1890 convention aimed at circumventing Black voting rights with "poll taxes and literacy tests on top of the intimidation and harassment." It highlights that by 1892, Mississippi had decreased Black male voter registration from 90% to 6%, "mainly due to Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and poll harassment," showing that intimidation and harassment—alongside legal restrictions—had a major impact on Black citizens’ ability to vote.

“A new report has tallied almost 4,000 lynchings of black people in the South during the Jim Crow era… The EJI report focuses specifically on what the group calls ‘racial terror lynchings.’ The victims were killed often because they had committed some type of social transgression (like bumping into a white woman) or because they were accused of a crime… In cases involving criminal accusations, lynching victims were not given the due process of a trial. The perpetrators of these lynchings were not charged with crimes for the killings… The EJI report calculates that there were 3,959 lynchings in the South from the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 to 1950.”

The original Klan had been specifically formed to combat freedoms for freed slaves, and the new Klan continued that trend. Members perpetrated lynchings, arson, beatings, and whippings.

The Brown decision fueled violent resistance during which Southern states used a variety of tactics to evade the law. In the summer of 1955, a surge of anti-black violence included the kidnapping and brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a crime that provoked widespread and assertive protests from black and white Americans. National and international media coverage of the use of fire hoses and attack dogs against child protesters precipitated a crisis in the Kennedy administration, which it could not ignore.

“Racial equality resulted in the reestablishment of racial subordination through biased laws, disenfranchisement and terrorism most dramatically enforced through lynchings. Racial terror lynchings of Black people defined a shameful era in America… These lynchings… were directed at all Black people; they enforced compliance with racial hierarchy and white supremacy and ensured racial segregation and denial of equal rights… EJI has confirmed the lynchings of over 4,000 Black people who were tortured, maimed, beaten, shot, hung and burned alive by crowds of white people often with the cooperation of law enforcement or government officials… The terror of lynching was so widespread that millions of Black people fled the South and settled in the urban North and West as refugees of American terror.”

During the 1920s, black Americans became targets for the Klan. They used a variety of methods to intimidate those they considered inferior, including threats of violence, burning crosses, and lynching. They used fear to prevent Black Americans from registering to vote.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund notes that Congress passed the First Enforcement Act in 1870 "to protect Black voters from intimidation and violence during Reconstruction." In a related post, it states that well into the 20th century Black women and men "faced racist laws, intimidation, and violence designed to keep them from voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965." These statements underscore that federal legislation was explicitly framed as a response to widespread violent intimidation aimed at preventing African Americans from exercising the right to vote.

“Domestic Terror: Understanding Lynching During the Jim Crow Era… This lesson exposes the crime of lynching and explores the many political, legal and social attempts made by individuals and organizations to seek justice… Featuring historical accounts and visual documents, this resource describes lynching as a form of domestic terrorism used to enforce racial hierarchies and intimidate African Americans who challenged segregation or attempted to exercise their rights.”

This documentary states that the first Klan became the violent enforcers of what Black people could do and could not do, and that former slaves could not be allowed to exercise their rights. It also describes segregation as the replacement system that lasted nearly a century.

“Mob violence… functioned as ritualized performances of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. Public spectacles of racial violence, including lynchings, were staged to reaffirm the racial order and to warn Black communities against transgressing boundaries of segregation or challenging white authority. These rituals of violence helped sustain the system of Jim Crow by dramatizing the consequences of resistance and reinforcing the subordination of African Americans.”

Public officials, including judges and police, enforced these rules with the support of white citizens councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and other vigilante groups. In many towns and counties, defiance invited violence, including lynching, eviction, or imprisonment. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 3,446 African-Americans were killed by mobs between 1882 and 1968. On the 7th of March 1965, a day that became known as Bloody Sunday, state troopers and local law enforcement violently attacked the marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

As the economy declined and political tensions in the south rose, Southern Democrats took back power in southern states and the federal government. They used their power to suppress and reverse civil rights gains for free and formerly enslaved black people. These white Southern Democrats passed restrictive voter legislation and electoral laws, like poll taxes, which dramatically disenfranchised large swaths of black voters. In addition to racist and discriminatory legislation, intimidation tactics and political violence were used to stop black men from voting.