Early Efforts
William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator in Boston, Massachusetts, a newspaper dedicated to the abolition movement. He was soon joined by a self-educated runaway slave from Maryland named Frederick Douglass. Douglass toured the nation speaking out against the brutality and inhumane treatment of slaves in the United States. He eventually started his own publication, The North Star, and became a major benefactor of the Underground Railroad in upstate New York. This system provided a safe means for runaway slaves to travel North to Canada where they could not be recaptured.

Radical Abolition
John Brown was a radical abolitionist that escalated the conflict between abolitionist and pro-slavery forces to a new level. He and his family moved to Kansas after Congress decided that the voting would decide if the Kansas or Nebraska Territories were to be free or slave through the Kansas-Nebraska Act. While there, they entered into armed conflict with pro-slavery forces. Brown and his sons became infamous for their brutal killing of five pro-slavery settlers in retribution for an earlier attack on pro-abolitionists. Brown then began to formulate plans to lead a massive armed slave uprising in the South.

John Brown's raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in modern-day West Virginia proved to be disastrous. Not only did slaves in the area not rise up against their owners, but two of Brown's sons were killed and Brown was caught and convicted of treason. He was tried in Virginia and was eventually hanged. However, his legacy lived on by causing the South to fear a vigilant North.

Civil War Brings Freedom
By 1861, the nation had become divided over the issue of slavery and entered into the Civil War. In 1865 the war ended and slaves were finally freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. Citizenship and equal protection were also extended to these freedmen by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Finally in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment gave all males, including freedmen, the right to vote.

These reforms continued until the end of Reconstruction in 1876, when U.S. federal troops withdrew from the South. After Reconstruction, the South returned to its olds ways.

Reconstruction Ends
Many of the new rights gained by former slaves were curtailed after Reconstruction ended. Even before the end of Reconstruction, terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used violence and intimidation against African-Americans in order to dominate them. Black Codes were passed in many southern states to control the actions and limit the rights of African-Americans so that they were kept in conditions resembling slavery. At the same time freedmen were disenfranchised, or kept from voting, through the use of the poll tax, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. Finally, Jim Crowe laws were enacted by states to establish racial segregation.