ABSTRACT
Systematic discrimination against African Americans and other people of color had been well established in the North long the abolition of slavery, and residential segregation became more extreme and, along with school segregation, more deeply entrenched in the North than in the South. During Reconstruction African Americans voted and were elected to public office, new state constitutions were established, and public schooling was begun. African Americans and their allies campaigned unsuccessfully for federal legislation against lynching. By the dawn of the twentieth century, political power was securely restored to a small class of economically dominant landowners and lynching became less frequent. One of the most poignant illustrations of the negligible value placed on black lives under Jim Crow is the Tuskegee study undertaken in Alabama by the US Public Health Service to trace the effects of untreated syphilis on African American males.
