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same success for himself. So he went to work.
    Then the Great Depression began. By 1932, the Atlantic Coast Lumber Company was out of business.
THE GREAT MIGRATION
    Losing a job is bad enough, but for African Americans the Depression became dangerous in other ways. Racial violence had already increased during the previous few decades. It was now extreme.
    The problem had begun about a dozen years after the Civil War ended. At the time, the former Confederate states were still under the legal control of the national government in Washington, D.C., which put the U.S. Army in charge. In a way, the southern states were being treated as if they had been foreign countries during the war. That was, after all, exactly how they had asked to be treated before they lost the war. The goal of Reconstruction, as the federal government's plan was called, was to set rules that the states could follow in order to govern themselves again and have a voice in Congress. These rules included protections for the rights of African Americans, such as the right to vote.
    Reconstruction was strongly opposed in the South. The country's most notorious hate group, the Ku Klux Klan, was formed at this time. It was one of many white supremacy groups that sought to terrorize African Americans. An informal rebellion was taking place. This was a period of great violence against African Americans and whites who supported Reconstruction. Then Reconstruction suddenly ended, thanks to a political deal.
    After the votes were counted in the 1876 presidential election, both the Democrats and the Republicans claimed victory. For several months, legal fights and political arguments dragged on. At the last minute, a deal was struck to give the presidency to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, whose support came from the North. In return, the former Confederate states, who had backed the Democratic candidate, got what they wanted in the first place: An agreement to end Reconstruction.
    Soon old faces were back in power in the South. They immediately passed laws to take from African Americans the rights that were granted during Reconstruction. Voting rights were the first to go. They created elaborate rules designed specifically to exclude African Americans. Then they passed laws requiring segregation. In South Carolina, for example, it was illegal for a restaurant to serve whites and African Americans in the same room, even if the owner wanted to do so. These segregation laws were called "Jim Crow" laws, after an African American character in a music hall song.
    The lowest moment in the history of Jim Crow may have come in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson and members of his cabinet introduced segregation in the federal government. This ranged from building crude office partitions to the firing of African American employees. Just a little later in Michelle's story, another connection between her life and the turning points of American history will appear when becomes part of Woodrow Wilson's most cherished legacy, a university built on the same beliefs he brought to the presidency.
    Voting rules and Jim Crow laws would be the target of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but that was still a long way off for young men like Michelle's grandfather. In the decade or so before the lumber yard closed, attacks on African Americans had become extreme. African Americans who had served in World War I came home in 1919 imagining that new opportunities waited for them. They found a fresh wave of Ku Klux Klan members who feared successful African Americans and were ready to do violence. The KKK and other groups and mobs even killed African American soldiers in uniform. The summer of 1919 is called "Red Summer" because so many riots against African Americans broke out. The first one happened in Charleston, South Carolina, not far from Georgetown.
    The lack of work, Jim Crow, violence: Michelle's grandfather decided he'd had enough. He did what more than a million