Freedmen massacres

The Freedmen massacres were a series of attacks on African-Americans which occurred in the states of the former Confederacy during Reconstruction, in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Many of these incidents were the result of a struggle over political power, especially after the voting rights of freedmen were protected through the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.^[1] Robert Smalls estimated that overall 53,000 African-American were killed in post-war racial terrorism, an estimate increasingly considered plausible by historians.^[2]

With reference to emancipation, we are at the beginning of the war.

— David L. Swain, former governor of North Carolina, 1865. as quoted in Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877

• "Four murders, 30 whippings, and 16 other horrible outrages" (1871, Alamance County)^[6]

• Pulaski riot
• Kirk–Holden war
• Black suffrage in the United States
• Enforcement Acts
• Freedmen's Bureau
• Ku Klux Klan § First Klan: 1865–1871
• Red Shirts (United States)
• Lynching in the United States
• Reconstruction Amendments
• Nadir of American race relations
  • Wilmington insurrection of 1898
  • Red Summer of 1919
  • Ocoee massacre (1920)
• Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner (1964)
• Orangeburg massacre (1968)
• List of massacres in the United States
• Mass racial violence in the United States
• List of disasters in the United States by death toll