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Reconstruction
Reconstruction is the name for the period just after the Civil War, when the southern states were to be brought back into the union and four million freed people were to become citizens. The period is decisive and was for much of the twentieth century presented as a failed and corrupt era — a historiography that itself served to justify the segregation that followed. Mississippi had two Black senators in the 1870s and none again until the twenty-first century. Jim Crow laws, poll taxes and literacy tests removed the vote in practice without naming race, and the arrangement stood until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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