D.
White Southerners soon looked for a way to rid themselves of corrupt politicians and Republican control. The first step was to prevent blacks from voting. White Southerners wanted to regain control of their states and knew they had to restore the Democratic Party to power. The ex-slaves usually voted for the Republican Party, which controlled the government; therefore, ending the black vote was important.
To promote these ends, secret societies were formed. The most notorious of these secret societies was the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan's original goal was to prevent the Republican's Reconstruction agenda, though it evolved into a violent and racist organization. Klan members, dressed in sheets and hoods, appeared at homes at night and warned the African Americans not to vote. As the Klan grew larger, it became bolder and sometimes used violence to promote its policies. Soon laws were passed that placed Southern elections under national control. The Klan's methods prevented so many African Americans from voting that white control returned in Southern elections.
Anti-Radical whites also organized to destroy carpetbag rule through the ballot. In state after state, they recaptured political control, until African Americans were eliminated from the political scene. The carpetbaggers were frightened away, and scalawags were won over. In 1877, all federal troops were removed from the South, and white supremacy was restored. The Reconstruction had ended, and, although the government had not solved all the problems in the South, the country was reunited at last.
By the late 1870s, thousands of blacks, landless and poor, decided to leave the South. In 1878, more than two hundred blacks sailed from Charleston Harbor for Liberia, in Africa. Many others decided to move west to the new territories that had been opened to settlement. In the Exodus of 1879, almost twenty thousand blacks left Mississippi and Louisiana for the frontiers of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Oklahoma. They established a number of all-black towns, like Langston, Oklahoma and Nicodemus, Kansas. They planted farms, settled in cities, and worked in mines.
Some blacks, especially those with Native American ancestry, found homes with Native American nations, and a few traveled throughout the West. Some African Americans went west with the U.S. military, as part of the all-black Ninth and Tenth cavalry units, which Native Americans called Buffalo Soldiers. Others went with wagon trains or as cowboys, moving cattle to market.
In the 1880s, a series of laws was passed separating blacks and whites. This segregation was called the Jim Crow system, after a minstrel show character from the 1830s who was a black slave and that negatively stereotyped blacks. Many Southern states passed laws restricting African American rights in almost every way.
