In spite of the fact that the South was forced to ratify the amendments, southern states quickly reestablished virtually the same state system that had existed before the war. They introduced new legislation – the black codes. In the countryside, a new share-crop system soon developed into ‘debt slavery’, and black people were in the same position as they had been in the antebellum period. By the 1880s, African Americans had been driven into an economic system from which they could not get out.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875 ruled that the states might not exclude blacks from public accommodation. Unofficial, de facto segregation had existed before the year of 1875 and the passing of the law was not a great improvement. In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment could only be applied to the state laws, it could not be enforced individually. At this point, real, de jure segregation started. Southern states quickly adopted a system of ‘Jim Crow’ legislation and began to pass laws permitting segregation in public facilities, creating separate schools, hospitals, restaurants, bus terminals, and even cemeteries. In fact, there did not exist any facilities for blacks in rural South.
According to Ronald Takaki:

“During the 1890s, new laws buttressed segregation by defining more precisely the ‘Negro’s place’ on trains and streetcars and in school, parks, theatres, hotels, and hospitals. Proclaiming the doctrine of separate but equal in the 1896 ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of segregation. Poll taxes and literacy requirements for suffrage were effectively disfranchising blacks, and hundreds of blacks were annually being lynched.”2

This was the ‘status quo’ at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although, black Americans had fought in the Civil War in spite to gain political and social equality, even until the end of World War II, the army still was not desegregated. In 1948, President Truman ordered desegregation of the armed forces3, feeling that racial discrimination might be regarded as un-American.
And this an indisputable fact that while African Americans fought abroad for democracy and liberty of other nations, they returned back to the USA to face unpleasant racial inequality. Since this moment we can understand the early post-war years as the beginning of the stronger and massive civil rights movement.
As I have already mentioned, the main aim of this essay is to discuss eventual changes in American society after the Brown decision in 1954. Brown v.