U.S. Political Protest

States can be toppled and replaced by sustained protest and contentious, rebellious movements. The most glaring instance of this in the United States is the American Revolution. The subtext of the Declaration of Independence is that governments can be legitimately, righteously replaced. Regime change is also evident in the aftermath of the American Civil War, with the defeat of the Confederacy and ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Regime change was also arguably the result of the American civil rights movement and the transformation of the solid Democratic Party South into a two-party system or in some states a one-party (Republican) South. The realignments caused by the civil rights movement have done away with the official, de jure forms of racial segregation, something that the countermovements of the White Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan tried to prevent.