Did Reconstruction Fail Or Succeed

Many historians claimed that Reconstruction was a failure. Despite the efforts of American Americans many Radical Republicans, Reconstruction ended without any real progress in the battle against racial discrimination. Federal and state governments failed to secure the rights guaranteed to former slaves by constitutional amendments. Although radical republicans wanted to help the former slaves, they made several serious mistakes. First, they assumed that extending certain civil rights to freed persons would enable them to protect themselves through participation in government, especially in lawmaking. However, Congress did not adequately protect those rights, and the Supreme Court undermined them. Second, the Radicals balked at distributing land to former slaves, which prevented them from becoming economically independent of the landowning planter class. Lastly, the Radicals did not fully realize the extent to which deep-seated racism in society would weakened the changes that Congress had attempted to make Furthermore, state Republican parties could not preserve black and white voter coalitions that would have enabled them to stay in power and continue political reform. Radical Republican governments were unable or unwilling to enact land

For example, a few African Americans were elected to Congress and others took seats in state and local governments. However, the unscrupulous nature of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy groups, in lieu with the Black Codes, began to threaten African Americans and steal back their equal rights . Also, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Supreme Court aided in brutally limit those equal rights of African Americans. Due to the malfunction of Reconstruction to grant ethnic egalitarianism, African Americans would be liberated but demoralized, middle-class citizens well into the 20th