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The following seven tables provide information about the numbers of African American officeholders in the South during Reconstruction and the backgrounds of those officeholders.

An article in the Washington Post about the events in Ferguson, published two days after the incident, provides larger context for the shooting."}">An article in the Washington Post about the events in Ferguson, published two days after the incident, provides larger context for the shooting.

In February 1875, Alabama’s black Republican legislators sent a petition to the US Congress, noting that "the Democratic Party of Alabama has made, and is now making, a deliberate and persistent attempt...to change the penal code and criminal laws of Alabama so as to place the liberty and legal rights of the poor man, and especially of the poor colored man, who is generally a Republican in politics, in the power and control of the dominant race who are, with few exceptions, the landholders, and Democratic in politics." The petition goes on to say that if this action is allowed to stand, the war to preserve the Union would have been a "grand mistake."

Learn how people in the late eighteenth-century used race science, social Darwinism, and eugenics to justify their ideas about membership.