The last reversal of black advancement was so crushing that historians called it the Nadir. It followed the leaps African Americans made after enslavement, during the cracked window of opportunity known as Reconstruction. The newly freed people built schools and businesses and ascended to high office. But a conservative counterreaction led to a gutting of the civil rights laws of that time and to the start of a Jim Crow caste system in the South that restricted every step an African American could make. Any breach of the system could mean one’s life. African Americans were lynched over
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