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=**End of Reconstruction**= Take note of important information you need.

Going into the congressional elections of 1874, Americans in the North were growing tired of defending black rights and their own corrupt Reconstruction governments in the South. As Radicals were losing their control of Congress, their goals of union, emancipation, and black equality would see equality be dropped and Congress would concentrate on keeping the nation together and the slaves free. The Panic of 1873 also took attention away from the South. Furthermore, battles with Indians in the West took soldiers out of the South, which meant less security for blacks and their supporters. As a result, white Republicans and blacks in the South feared going to the polls to vote, so they stopped. It got tough to defend black equality with hard times and high taxes plus the South would undermine legislation passed in favor of black equality. Once Redeemer Democrats began gaining power in the South, policies in Southern state governments would favor the segregation and discrimination of blacks. The South began to act as if it had defeated the North's legislation if not the armies. Case in point was the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It wasn't enforced in the South and it would eventually be ruled unconstitutional. How do you think that could happen? So, blacks had to go through several more decades of segregation and discrimination until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s led by Martin Luther King Jr. only to see the same legislation passed in 1964 that had been passed in 1875!

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