Reconstruction On African Americans Essay

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Effects of the Reconstruction Period on African Americans The Reconstruction Era is seen as a period of time where the nation was uniting once again. Despite this viewpoint, this is not how everyone perceived this epoch as a great unification. Many African-Americans still dealt with oppression, despite promise of a better life when the Civil War finally ended. Granted, there were many advancements toward equal rights among black and white men and women, but many Southerners were not pleased with the fact that they lost a majority of their workers, which in turn resulted in unfair treatment to these newly “freed” slaves. The political effect that the Reconstruction era had on African-Americans was that they were now “able to vote”. They received …show more content…

There were some people who were determined to keep the things as close to the way they were as physically possible. The Black Codes were passed by Southern states in 1865 after the Civil War ended. The purpose of these laws was to restrict the new freedoms of African Americans and to try and necessitate them to work in a labor economy based on their low wages or heavy debt. This series of laws etiolated African Americans and tried to enforce segregation even more than it was already being done. Blacks had many restrictions placed upon them merely because of the color of their skin. If an African American was thought to be unemployed, he or she could have been hired out to a white citizen for the rest of the year. In response to these laws, the Jim Crow laws were passed. These laws came to pass after the fourteenth and the fifteenth amendment established that the Black Codes were considered unconstitutional. A group of Democrats, known as the Reformers, later took control of many political positions in the South and tried to end segregation between the two races. Despite the new “free” title, the land was not free to many of these people. Many slaves who were considered “free” were returned to the plantations that they worked on because many people did not accept the emancipation of the

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