9781422272701

WORDS TO UNDERSTAND

chattel slavery— a system in which persons are enslaved for the entirety of their lives, and whose children and grandchildren are automatically enslaved. Freedmen’s Bureau— formally the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, an agency established by Congress in 1865 to help former Black slaves and poor Whites in the South after the American Civil War. lynching— a mob action in which a person is put to death without proper legal proceedings; carried out disproportionately against Black Americans in the decades following the American Civil War. segregation— the enforced separation of different racial groups in a county, state, or country. Three-fifths Compromise— a provision of the original US Constitution that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for determining a state’s population, and therefore its representation in Congress; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) eliminated this provision.

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