The new laws established by Lincoln were mostly unenforced and, therefore, vastly ignored or transgressed. For example, whereas any man should have been able to vote, very few were actually afforded the opportunity because of poll taxes or literacy tests required prior to voting. First of all, because slaveholders did not allow their slaves to learn to read or write, the chance of passing a literacy test was slim to none. Secondly, most could not afford a poll tax because of their participation in largely unfair sharecropping, which allowed them to feed their families and have a place to live, but that was it. Most or all of the money earned from crops was given to the owner of the field. So, in a way, while legally they were free, they were still slaves from a social standpoint. That is until the civil rights movement began in the 1960s, achieving "the greatest political and social gains for blacks since Reconstruction" ("Slavery in America" sec. ??).
In 1896, came “separate but equal” segregation, condoned by our very own Supreme Court (“Civil Rights Timeline” 1). Since discrimination in voting was outlawed by the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, segregation was practically the only (legal) way to openly practice racism and was the spark behind most of the fire