section_path: Jim Crow era/Lead-up to Jim Crow
section_name: Lead-up to Jim Crow
paragraph_text: Lead-up to Jim Crow
  
  The first reconstruction started with the Emancipation proclamation in 1863. In the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, the federal government of the United States initially took an active role in reducing racial discrimination. Between 1865 and 1870, three amendments to the Constitution were passed to address racial inequality in the South: the Thirteenth (which abolished most forms of slavery), the Fourteenth (which addressed Citizenship Rights and equal protection under the law) and the Fifteenth (which made it illegal to deny the right to vote on the basis of " race, color, or previous condition of servitude"). With this, the number of African American men who could vote went from 0.5% in 1866 to 70% in 1872. These amendments would have offered more sweeping protections but some Republican lawmakers wanted to limit their impact so that they would not apply to immigrants or poorer people in their districts.
  
  By the late 1870s, however, white backlash against the social, economic and political gains of Black people (exemplified by the violence and persecution they faced from terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan) contributed to the Compromise of 1877, wherein the Democratic Party (then-dominated by Southern white supremacists) agreed to let Republicans win the 1876 presidential election, in exchange for removing federal troops in the South and, in the words of historian James M. McPherson, "the abandonment of the black man to his fate." Former supporters of Reconstruction era policies began to argue that the government had made "too many changes too fast", and a White conservative movement within the Republican Party also started to gain influence.