Freedmen massacres

The Freedmen massacres were a series of attacks on African-Americans which occurred in the states of the former Confederacy during Reconstruction, in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Many of these incidents were the result of a struggle over political power, especially after the voting rights of freedmen were protected through the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.^[1] Robert Smalls estimated that overall 53,000 African-American were killed in post-war racial terrorism, an estimate increasingly considered plausible by historians.^[2]

With reference to emancipation, we are at the beginning of the war.

— David L. Swain, former governor of North Carolina, 1865. as quoted in Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877