NARRATOR
While Tunis Campbell fought aggressively for black rights, John Roy Lynch moved more cautiously. Lynch had been a house slave in Natchez, Mississippi. After the war, he had learned to read, taught himself photography, and worked his way up in the business.

PAINTER
I think he only had about four months of formal schooling. But he's a very bright young man, and a fast learner. He listened, and he was also in the photography business, so he heard a lot of people who could afford to have their pictures taken.

NARRATOR
Lynch's customers talked politics, and he soaked it up, even teaching himself parliamentary law. By 1870, he was a newly elected state legislator walking up the steps of the Mississippi capitol. He was 22 years old.

FONER
John R. Lynch is one of those guys who is created by the Reconstruction situation. Opportunities open to him, which could have been, which would have been inconceivable before this moment.

V/O John Roy Lynch
This legislature had some very important work before it. The entire government had to be reconstructed so as to place it in perfect harmony with the new order of things.

AYERS
Black legislators are not asking for really radical changes. They're asking for deeply American things: equality in the courthouse; the right to be on juries; the right to testify in your own behalf.

FONER
A lot of what these black lawmakers and white Republicans are trying to do, you might almost say, is bring the South into the nineteenth century. Public school systems, for example, the South didn't have that. Large numbers of southern whites were illiterate. Reconstruction establishes the first public school systems in the South.

NARRATOR
Within a year, Mississippi opened 230 new schools for blacks, and 252 for whites. There were plans for new hospitals, railroads. But who would pay the bill? Before the Civil War, slave-owners had paid most of the taxes. Now, the burden shifted to anyone who owned land, small farmers as well as rich planters.

AYERS
White southern landowners said, "If you think for a minute that I'm going to give up my hard-earned money to build up the government to take care of colored people, you're crazy."

NARRATOR
Lynch had some sympathy for the white opposition.

V/O John Roy Lynch
The war had just come to a close, leaving most of the people in an impoverished condition. Their property was in a state of decay. To have the rate of taxation increased was to them a very serious matter.

NARRATOR
After fierce debate, Lynch and the Republicans managed to pass the tax increase. In statehouses and small towns across the South, black officials were transforming daily life for former slaves.

DUNCAN
As African Americans encountered local government, for the first time in their lives they were encountering black faces behind the desk, faces that were accepting, faces that knew who they were, what they had been through.

AYERS
There was one thing that white southerners feared more than anything else. They used one word for lots of different kinds of things. They called it "Negro rule." Well, when you have a black sheriff with a gun, that's Negro rule. Sometimes even if you have a black postmaster, who makes white women stand in line to get stamps -- that could be Negro rule. It all looks like Negro rule, and it's hard for white southerners to get a sense of proportion about all this, because they consider all of it a violation of the natural order, a violation of the way that things should be.