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Backed by every structure of power in the North, the South pushed black people back towards slavery by a white terrorist campaign which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people. And this campaign of terror was sanctioned by the Superme Court which sucked the meaning out of the Fourteenth Amendment and invalidated the Reconstruction civil rights law.

Black people protested. They organized protests and called on the President, but nobody was listening and nobody really cared. The Democratic Party was openly hostile then, and there was no real alternative for black people who continuted to vote Republican, but of habit and out of despair.

Black people were driven from power in the South by terror and fraud. But individual Republicans managed to hold onto power for several years in several states. And black voters sent representatives to Southern legislatures and congressmen to Washington until the dawn of the twentieth century.

As the years wore on, the area of black expressiveness narrowed, and by World WAr 1, it was condidered subversive for black men to hold public office.

The violent overthrow of Reconstruction set the stage for the Great Migration to the North which began around 1913 and continues today. Like the various imigrant groups, black people were soon organized into political machines. But these machines were composed of mutually hostile groups pursuing a politics of patronage and stalemates. Within the boundaries of this situation, black people would veto openly hostile policies; but they could not translate voting power into fundamental group gains. As a result, black people were penetrated by feelings of political powerlessness. Since politics had no revelance to their agony, since it was not an activity with which they could lift themselves, they began to look on it with indifference. Worse, some black people came to see politics as a marketable activity involvin the trading of voters for petty political favors.