African American Change Between 1865 And 1920 Essay

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Shane Boutwell Tara Monica McCarthy HST 112 WI 25 October 2015 African American Change between 1865 and 1920 The African American community has had a long struggle in their battle for equality, fortunately after the civil war abolished slavery in the U.S and began the long road of rebuilding and equality. Not everyone agreed with the abolishment of slavery even after the war because for a long time it was a norm to own slaves, it was just a part of life at the time as the Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens referred to slavery as the “cornerstone” of southern life just as many of the southern plantation owners also thought like South Carolina plantation owner Thomas Drayton who said "We are fighting for home & liberty." But when Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863, …show more content…

The amendment was intended to grant citizenship to and protect the civil liberties of freed slaves. This Amendment prevented states from not allowing African American citizens to live their lives like any other free citizen in the United States including equal protection of the laws. Black codes were embraced by mid-western states to control or limit the relocation of free African-Americans to the mid-west. Coldblooded and extreme black code laws were embraced by southern states after the Civil War to control or impose the old social structure. Southern congress passed laws that confined the social equality of the liberated previous slaves. Mississippi was the first state to create laws that abolished the full social liberties of African-Americans. "An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for Other Purposes," an extremely deceptive title, was gone in 1865. Different states immediately embraced their own particular variants of the codes, some of which were restrictive to the point that they took after the old arrangement of slavery, for example, forced work for different

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