1869

The National Convention of Colored Men meets in Washington, D.C., promoting suffrage for all black men and the education of former slaves. Advocacy and for rights continues through the Equal Rights Leagues.

Congress approves an amendment to the Reconstruction bill for Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, requiring those states to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment before being readmitted to Congress.

New York becomes the first northern state to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment.

James Lewis, John Willis Menard, and Pinckney B.S. Pinchback, all black men from Louisiana, are elected to Congress and but are never seated.

General Ulysses S. Grant is elected President. Although allied with the Radical Republicans in Congress, he proves a weak leader for Reconstruction.

Tennessee is the first of many Southern states to establish an all-white, Democratic Redeemer government sympathetic to the cause of the former Confederacy and against racial equality.

In Texas v. White, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that secession is illegal.

The first black American diplomat is elected as minister to Haiti.