With about 60,000 members across the United States,[3] in the South, the groups were founded primarily to oppose racial integration of public schools following the US Supreme Court ruling in 1954 that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. They also opposed voter registration efforts in the South, where most blacks had been disenfranchised since the turn of the 20th century, and integration of public facilities during the 1950s and 1960s. <u>Members used intimidation tactics including economic boycotts, firing people from jobs, propaganda, and threatening and committing violence against civil-rights activists.</u>
Southern states continued to deny Black men the right to vote using a collection of state and local statutes during the Jim Crow era. Subsequent amendments to the Constitution granted women the right to vote and lowered the legal voting age to 18.
The compromise lasted until the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, when Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas proposed legislation allowing the issue of slavery to be decided in the new territories. ... Once the transatlantic slave trade was prohibited, domestic slave trading throughout the South increased.
