Following the Civil War and emancipation of enslaved African Americans, Congress passed three Constitutional Amendments in the 1860s, known as the Reconstruction Amendments, that abolished slavery and involuntary servitude (13th), provided citizenship to those born or naturalized in the U.S. regardless of race (14th), and guaranteed the right of all citizens to vote (15th). The following decade, known as the Reconstruction era (1863 - 1877), was the attempt by the U.S. Government to address the inequities and the protect the rights of newly enfranchised African Americans.
However, the 1880s marked the resurgence of white supremacy in the south and the rollback of these advancements; Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and quasi-renslavement through convict leasing eliminated the gains made by freed people. One of the most infamous Supreme Court rulings that codified state-sanctioned segregation and provided the foundation for institutionalized inequality was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The majority opinion effectively declared “separate but equal” public facilities, such as schools and public transportation, as constitutional and not in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. While these Black-only schools may have been denoted as “equal”, in reality they did not receive nearly the same amount of funds as white-only schools and lacked adequate resources and facilities for Black children. Teachers at Black schools were paid substantially less and resources at Black schools were often discarded by nearby white schools. In South Carolina, the government spent 3x as much on white schools than Black schools and 100x more on the transportation of white children than Black children to schools.
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