The Reconstruction era offered African Americans in the South something they had long been denied but had always wanted: an equal chance. The passing of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments laid a path for African Americans towards equality and guaranteed them equal treatment under the law. Yet as quickly as hopes were raised, they were dashed: the South had been restored to status quo antebellum, “how it was before the war.” The adoption of Black codes to curtail African American freedoms, the rise of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and the Compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction all but sealed the fate of Black Americans who were left with a feeling of betrayal by the federal government that they had put their trust in. The era of Jim Crow, named after a racist character depicted by white performer Thomas D. Rice, created two schools of Black thought that looked to define how Blacks in America should forge ahead: accommodation or protest.