The pre-Civil Rights era bridges the gap between the end of the Civil War (1865) and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement (1955). For African Americans, it spans the turbulent years between the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation (January 31, 1863), which marked the beginning of the end of slavery, and the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which guaranteed the rights of African Americans as full-fledged citizens.
For black Americans, the pre-Civil Rights era was a time of danger and turmoil, as they set out to claim their rights as U.S. citizens in a hostile country that refused to grant them those rights. As Gaines illustrates in depicting the lives of the people in the quarter, many blacks lived in poverty, denied the right to earn a decent wage by white landowners who kept them in a virtual state of slavery as sharecroppers.
Although the Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery in the Confederate states, it was not until the passage of the thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution two years later (December 18, 1865) that slavery was abolished throughout the country. To mitigate its effect, the Ku Klux Klan, founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, began its reign of terror against newly enfranchised blacks, marking the beginning of a series of events geared toward keeping blacks "in their place."
