Black And White Lives : Reshaping And Reordering After The Civil War Essay

Following the Civil War, America was in shambles. There were many groups with strong, conflicting ideas of how things should be. However, most groups had one idea in common: reducing the rights of African Americans as much as possible. Freed slaves had very little freedom under the law, were treated like a lesser species by those around them, and faced dangerous environments everywhere they went. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation may have legally freed slaves, but African Americans were barely more than paid slaves.

Slavery was abolished after the Civil War, but the Negro race still was not accepted as equals into American society. To attain a better understanding of the events and struggles faced during this period, one must take a look at its' literature. James Weldon Johnson does an excellent job of vividly depicting an accurate portrait of the adversities faced before the Civil Rights Movement by the black community in his novel “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.” One does not only read this book, but instead one takes a journey alongside a burdened mulatto man as he struggles to claim one race as his own.

African American that became a Freedmen are now officially a full United States citizen, but now face with segregation from the white. The government however, help with these problem with the Freedmen Bureau program. The South’s reaction to the Reconstruction that were given out to the North however, felt that their land are being taken by the carpetbaggers from the North for their political and economic gained during the 1863 to 1877. The Reconstruction are still seen overall as both positive and negative because it has had it’s downfall and gain from it. The aftermath of Reconstruction however, allowed blacks many rights that they have never gotten before and it’s a good beginning to Americans and the country as a whole for ending the unholiness of

Moreover, the document links the changing definition of freedom for whites as self-ownership. In contrast, the changing definition of freedom for blacks meant having full political rights, citizenship, and owning land. In Eric Foner’s Voices of Freedom, a former slave’s petition to the president, who took his lands away to give to the previous owners states, “[t]his is our home, we have made These lands what they are,” for he demands to the president himself that they deserve the right to own land. The treatment of black Southerners differed greatly from white Southerners due to the idea of white supremacy. Colby’s story matters because Reconstruction aimed to rebuild the South, although that did not occur for black Southerners, since black oppression continued on after this time

When I survey the landscape in black America, it does not take long for me to recognize the massive impression of a vehement struggle of a collective group of people to simply keep their head above water. The problem in the black community is that it is where every ill of this nation is felt first. It is the place in which much of the economic devastation is felt and absorbed in order to relieve some of the pressure off of this nation’s more affluent citizens.

As a result of the North’s victory in the civil war and the reconstruction period that followed, African-Americans were seemingly on the verge of being able to enjoy the freedom of no longer being slaves. During the reconstruction era, important pieces of legislature were written in order to protect the rights of the newly freed men. Those pieces of legislature were essentially trying to somehow transform former slave into free productive members of society. However, a number of disgruntled southerners took it as their duty to prevent African-American from being free of their former masters. They saw the northerners demand as an infringement of the South traditional values. Although the

Looking at the social order at the time is important to understanding what is to come. While the slaves were now free and able to do as they pleased, there was still a deeply embedded racism within the minds of Southern whites. Just because blacks had fought in the Civil War did not suddenly mean that the perception of blacks had changed; rather to the Southern elites, they still viewed blacks as inferior and only good for labor, longing to perpetuate the slave system but within a new industrial framework seeing as how the agricultural framework had been destroyed. This new system was to be found in through convict leasing.

The newly freed slaves were gaining rights that were always only a dream with legal marriage, education, and power over their children’s lives. However, Black Codes were being used to recreate slavery and were making it hard for African Americans to own property and function in society. (Lecture 1/29/16) Their rights were not given without many exceptions including that African Americans who were convicted of felonies were being put back to work on farms that they were just given the freedom to leave, and all of a sudden it was much easier to get a felony charge for being black and not having a job were considered committing a crime. President Johnson’s neglect of action in southern states was making it nearly impossible for the former slaves to function in society, even after The Civil Rights Act of 1866, and leads into the creation of the Ku Klux Klan

In 1865, the United States government implemented what was known as Reconstruction. Its’ purpose was to remove slavery from the south, and give African-American’s the freedom in which they deserved. However, the freedom that they deserved was not the freedom that they received. With documents like The Black Codes restricting them from numerous privileges that white people had and the terroristic organization known as the Klu Klux Klan attacking and killing them, African-American’s were still being oppressed by their government as well as their fellow man. Slavery may have been abolished, but African-American’s were not yet given the freedom and rights that their white counterparts took for granted.

Racial equality has been a feat that blacks and other people of color have wanted since first being enslaved and brought over to America centuries ago, however efforts towards that equality hadn’t started until the Civil War. The freeing of the slaves may have been a war strategy used by Lincoln, but it opened the door for many gains towards equality that may not have even been there before. Freeing black slaves was the largest gain of all, one that led to educational opportunities and paying jobs for those freed. Many of the slaves freed were given assistance from the Freedman’s Bureau, or a “Federal Reconstruction Agency established to protect the legal rights of former slaves and to assist with their education, jobs, health care, and land ownership” (Shi and Tendall 515). This allowed many of the freed

The whole research paper is over, “Have African Americans made significant progress since the end of the Civil War in 1865? Examine the challenges that African Americans faced during the Reconstruction Era through to the modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Look at the impact that legislation has had from the "Civil War Amendments" to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the rise of Jim Crow and the KKK, and the events and figures that helped shape the African American experience during that time span?”

The critical development during Reconstruction was the attainment of citizenship for African-Americans. In 1858 the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that “persons of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants—whether or not they were slaves—could never be citizens of the United States” [Hahn 2005: 106]. But it was apparent that the Dred Scott decision would eventually yield, as increasing numbers of slaves started to escape to Union lines during the Civil War, and after Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation speech. Since citizenship was defined and protected by state law during Reconstruction, American federalism would dictate the direction of the status of former slaves. In other words, one could not postulate the citizenship status of African-Americans until the relation between the former Confederate states and the nation as a whole was

Over the next three decades, the rights once promised to blacks had been disregarded under white rule, the fight for black rights had been forgotten as they were segregated and condemned to live in poverty with little to no hope. This left freedmen where they started, leaving behind the legacy of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth

The conclusion of the Civil War in favor of the north was supposed to mean an end to slavery and equal rights for the former slaves. Although laws and amendments were passed to uphold this assumption, the United States Government fell short. The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments were proposed and passed within five years of the Civil War’s conclusion. These amendments were to create equality throughout the United States, especially in the south where slavery had been most abundant. Making equality a realization would not be an easy task. This is because many problems were not perceived before and during the war. The reunification of the country would prove to be harder than expected, and entry into a new lifestyle would be

The black freedom struggle has not yet come to an end – there are still prejudiced and racist radicals that try to negotiate white supremacy and dominance in order to prevent the blacks from their long wait for equality. Consequently, the movement has progressed very sluggishly in the past few centuries. Nevertheless, the campaign for equal rights has led to the triumph over slavery and has led to the accrual of suffrage rights. However, this is still not enough, not after centuries of enslavement, lynching, segregation, and discrimination. Oftentimes, there is still no justice in court houses, especially when black people are accused and convicted, even for the simplest of crimes – as compared to the white and powerful who are charged for heinous misconducts and get away scratch free. Hence, throughout the period of the Blacks’ long fight for freedom and equality, several Black intellectuals have come front with ideas that could administer better treatment for their people. A good strategy to encourage the black populace to fight for their freedom and their rights is by inverting popular ideas so that there is a clear distinction between the reasonable and unreasonable notions of equality and justice. Thus, it was not uncommon for these literati to undermine dominant discourses in order to bolster their own analyses. Among the discussed black intellectuals who inverted prevailing dissertations, three that stood out the most are Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, and