When white men fell out in 1861, Black Americans gained a measure of freedom. But by 1915, 50 years after the end of the Civil War, blacks in the Southern States could neither vote nor sit on juries. They were segregated and locked into a system of sharecropping that differed little, in practice, from slavery. This of white supremacy could not have happened without the North's tacit approval, but how did it happen and why?