This week on the Lectures and History podcast Tulane University Professor Blake Gilpin

examines three important Supreme Court cases from the Reconstruction era.

The Slaughterhouse cases, United States v. Cruikshank and Plessy v. Ferguson.

Professor Gilpin explains how those rulings

weakened civil rights protections and laid the legal foundation for Jim Crow segregation, a system

of state and local laws, racial separation and discrimination against black Americans for decades.

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All righty folks. Can everybody me all right this room is insanely big it looks like my class is very unpopular I'm gonna get started obviously as I told you

we're filming for C-SPAN so so I don't know that that changes anything.

Earlier this week, I was telling you all about this absolute deluge of white supremacist violence

that gripped the former Confederacy, but especially the state that we are in, Louisiana after the Civil War.

In particular, what I was telling you about, hopefully that you gather from Tuesday's lecture,

was about this trio of racial massacres that are really just sort of the high points

in this sort of decade-plus-long campaign of violence against Republicans and emancipated slaves.

Those comprise the Colfax massacre, the Kushada massacre, and the Battle of Liberty Place.

All of those incidents and this campaign in general really served to violently erode black equality

...