The Supreme Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment very narrowly, stating that the federal government could not prosecute individuals for discriminatory acts. Lynching's and mob violence were left to the states to handle. Within a generation after the end of Reconstruction 1877
For more than 200 years before the Civil War, slavery existed in the United States. But after the war things began to get worse for blacks. The south thought they needed to do something. The Southern legislatures, former confederates, passed laws known as the black codes, after the war, which severely limited the rights of blacks and segregated them from whites.
