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Hamburg, South Carolina, was an all-black town on the border with Georgia, an area that was a stronghold for the Democratic Party. Hearing news of white militias forming in surrounding towns, the intendant (or mayor) of Hamburg, John Gardner, formed an all-black militia of 84 men and, with the following letter, asked the governor to arm them as part of the state’s National Guard.

A high school student reflects on being raised by his older brother and the legacy of the karate blackbelt his brother gave to him.

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.