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Radical Republicans were then faced with the double problem of restoring these states to the Union while stopping the bleeding of the Black Codes that continued the war by other means, an approach, W.E.B. Du Bois once described as “Looking Backward.”<ref>W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press, 2000), 128-81.</ref> The complex battles that then ensued to address these issues centered on the Fourteenth Amendment, The Freedmen’s Bureau, the eventual Reconstruction Bill, and the question of civil rights.

Civil Rights might be quickly defined as those rights which define and support what it means to be a citizen. In the United States, the rights of citizenship include but are not limited to the ability to be afforded the opportunity to make and benefit from one’s own work in an open market and to be protected from harm in these capacities. Thus civil rights include the ability to make contracts, be free from restrictions of movement, and to participate in the decision-making bodies that enforce laws that everyone agrees upon. These “liberal” rights were thought to be grounding of the unique idea of America. After the Civil War, the question became would those same rights be afforded to peoples of African descent—it would come to be a large question and is the reason that the term “civil rights” is so often and consistently associated with the Black freedom struggle. In answering that question, the Black Codes signaled a resounding “no.”

In the 1875 act, we see the initial assaults against the coming segregationist policies of Jim Crow. There was a fundamental belief that in order to enjoy the privileges of liberal citizenship, one had to be able to access the public commons as well as those accommodations that are available to all citizens. After the passage of this law, that belief changed, leading to a series of legislative and Supreme Court defeats that struck at the core of the spirit of the civil rights legislation of the Reconstruction years. The 1883 set of cases, known as the ''Civil Rights Cases'' effectively dismantled the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and over time certain interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment came to include “corporate citizenship.” The net result of all of this was that the period that historian Rayford Logan calls, “the nadir” was now afoot—it was a period where the protections of civil rights were denied and Jim Crow reigned supreme, and legally so with the passage of ''Plessy v. Ferguson'' in 1896.<ref>Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997).</ref>

[[File:Brownvboard.jpg|thumb|left|George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James Nabrit, attorneys for plaintiff in Brown V. Board of Education celebrate a victory, May 17, 1954]]

The resistance to Jim Crow reached a fever pitch by the 1950s. The context for that shift is important to understand. Legal scholar, Derrick Bell, is perhaps prescient when he argues that it was “interest convergence.” That is to say, it there was an alternative benefit that accrued to the United States that motivated attempts to protect the civil rights of African Americans. For Bell, it was the ongoing conflict with the Soviet Union, which had utilized Jim Crow in its propaganda wars with the United States. As a result, by the late 1940s, federal laws began to shift, a Civil Rights Commission was formed in 1947, and the Supreme Court formally abolished Jim Crow in 1954, with ''Brown v. Board of Education''. But there was still more to be done, particularly with the question of enforcement as Brown II mandated segregation but with “all deliberate speed.” In 1957, a minor law was passed to create a civil rights division in the Department of Justice and nominally protect Black voting rights. It became the first Civil Rights Act since the Reconstruction period. And in 1960, these protections were strengthened with the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

[[File:Cra1964.jpg|thumb|left| President Lyndon B. Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr. after singing of Civil Rights Act of 1964, July 2, 1964]]

In the ensuing years the Black freedom struggle intensified. The sit-in movements began in 1960, drawing attention to the fact that although illegal, many public accommodations were still segregated. A movement that utilized nonviolent direct action was pioneered by organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group of young activists that engaged Jim Crow face-to-face. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which formed in the wake of the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, led campaigns in cities where particularly egregious cases of segregation held sway. Birmingham was one such place, and Project C was the name given to the campaign to attack segregation in that city. This time the cameras were there.

Then came the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the wake of that moment, President Lyndon B. Johnson vowed that the civil rights bill that Kennedy had been working on with leaders of the movement like King, must finally come to pass. That law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed on July 2, 1864, and aggressively outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment and public accommodations. It was the most important of all the twenty-first century civil rights laws, by far. For it also included strong enforcement procedures for violations.<ref>See Civil Rights Act of 1964,https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=97&page=pdf</ref> For these reasons, it has rightly been lauded as landmark legislation, though many also erroneously view it as the “end” of the civil rights movement.

In fact, there were other civil rights laws, including the 1968 Civil Rights Act and the 1991 Act, which outlawed housing discrimination and strengthened the employment protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, respectively. All of these legislative victories are the legacy of those who established the principles of civil rights protections after the Civil War and the continued struggle to oppose resistances to that foundational moment like Jim Crow. As such, this legislative history remains relevant today.