Radical Reconstruction sweeps across the South.

Radical Reconstruction, the world's first large-scale experiment in interracial democracy, sweeps across the South; white resistance flares into violence. Northern commitment to Reconstruction wanes as the white Southern version of Reconstruction, the "lost cause,"captures the Northern imagination. By 1877, Reconstruction is over, but it has laid the groundwork, both in legislation and in black memory, for the great Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.