Use this Lesson once students have a strong understanding of the rights of African Americans both before and after the passing of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. It would also be helpful for students to have read the O. O. Howard and the Freedmen’s Bureau and The Ku Klux Klan and Violence at the Polls Narratives.

Objectives:

• Students will examine the ways in which, after emancipation and the Reconstruction Amendments, the legal status of African Americans was different from their experience under the institution of slavery
• Students will analyze primary source documents by answering comprehension questions to guide them to identify the inconsistencies of the legal status of African Americans in the nineteenth century.

Handout A: Document Packet

• Virginia Slave Codes: “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves,” 1705
• Runaway Slave Ad, 1860
• Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified December 6, 1865
• An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for other Purposes, 1865
• Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified July 28, 1868
• Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified February 3, 1870
• Opinion of the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

Students can work individually, in pairs, or in small groups to evaluate the documents in this lesson.