Although the law changed, people were not as quick to the change, so African American were continually mistreated until others stood up for them and put their feet down just like Thurgood Marshall did in order to let African Americans gain equality. Marshall was a strong believer in the law and that things can and would change for the better like how he suggested "The Negro who was once enslaved by law
Besides, the endless conflicts caused a severe economic depression in 1873 (Foner 587). Certainly, it was a terrible period; but during these times, Black people were at last freed from slavery and received some rights. Indeed, they faced violence and discrimination at every turn; but it is better to be free and have a chance to protect oneself, than to be a slave, unable to control any of the aspects of your life and completely depend on a whim of somebody who treats you as their personal possession. We don’t know the exact statistics, though; perhaps people, especially Blacks, quantitatively underwent more suffering during the Reconstruction that during many other periods before or after it. But, if we think of e.g. how Blacks were transported from Africa in the 1700s, tightly packed in slave ships so that they couldn’t even change their pose, having to endure this for weeks, massively dying before even reaching America, it is possible to say that the Reconstruction wasn’t “the darkest period of American history”.
The south was especially upset considering they didn’t want to pay for labor that was once free to them. There continued to be a major separation in American society and by law. Slave codes quickly became black codes. These were a similar set of laws to slave codes, with the same overall goal. The civil war marked freedom to 4 million slaves.
In the seventeenth chapter of A People 's History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn, he discussed the anger and emotion in African Americans. He implored how it can erupt in big ways. Even though, the government created reforms, they were not fundamental and the laws passed were not enforced. This developed two different ideologies in society about how to deal with the problem of discrimination and racism. In society, African Americans had been oppressed for a long time, leading to the ultimate question "Does it explode?"
According to William Hoar about the Black Codes, “In an attempt to bring order, a number of states legally adopted Black Codes prohibiting the often uneducated and illiterate Blacks from sitting on juries, carrying weapons, committing adultery, being vagrants, and violating curfew and segregation laws”. John Alexander Carroll and Odie B. Faulk in Home of the Brave, “That blacks had to have a steady occupation and they carried heavy penalties for violations of labor contracts.” Eventually the codes effectively made racism legal (Hoar). The next misstep of the Reconstruction was the Ku Klux Klan.
The Reconstruction failed to bring social and economic equality to former slaves for many reasons. The primary reason was because people said they wanted the blacks to have equality, but the laws enacted to give them equality were poorly enforced. White southerners heavily oppressed the black population and caused the failure of the Reconstruction. During the Reconstruction many white southerners were very angry about their slaves being freed.
Traditional southern whites became violent during the early years of Reconstruction. They have assaulted the blacks, which got in their way even to the point of murdering them. They disdain the fact that both the blacks and the whites became equals after the Civil War. This incident posed a failure in the Reconstruction because not all the southern whites were able to accept the reality that blacks were no longer slaves but part of the American society with equal rights and citizenship. The government somehow failed to rehabilitate the way of thinking of the whites due to the fact that some of the leaders of the nation still have opposing views on how to treat liberty as a
The primary objective of the Reconstruction was to reunite the North and the South; however the South gave backlash to the integration of African Americans into their society. They viewed it as a compromise of their ideology. The reconstruction failed to reunite the nation because of the nation’s differences in opinion towards integration. This proved to be a large enough obstacle for the Reconstruction to not achieve its goals and be deemed ineffective. The era of the Reconstruction was a struggle for integration where legislation promoting persecution of African-Americans, polarizing the nation and increasing tensions in the south.
The south was especially notorious for lynching blacks. About eighty-three percent of people lynched were black. In 1922, "The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill" was an effort to stop lynching altogether in the United States. The people behind this bill were obviously not okay with lynching, and saw it as an unlawful and immoral thing to do to another human being.
The relationship of mass incarceration and the legacy of slavery is that people who committed felon were stripped of their rights like the slaves. It is similar to the way slaves were treated before the 13th Amendment and the Civil Rights Movement. Even though the 13th Amendment was passed, many individuals found a loophole, which was a person who committed a crime could not have the same rights as everyone. This eventually causes people to arrest people of color regardless of whether or not they committed a crime.
At the end, no matter what white Americans would do to belittle African Americans, it still doesn’t change the fact that many African Americans roles after the Civil War changed because they were now
Lynching was a tool used to enforce segregationist ideologies and devalue the lives of African Americans (Feliks Garcia). Many African Americans could not trust the police, judges and politics because of the fear of being sent to jail or killed. There was no justice for African Americans and nobody could protect them from being lynched or beaten. This created a distrust between the legal system and the African American community which can still be seen today. These horrific historical facts created the institutionalize ideology that makes racial disparity so unfair when it comes to African American
I think it was wrong to treat blacks unequally because of something they can 't control. They can 't control what their skin color is or what they were born with, so how does it make sense? Integration was very important at this time, just imagine your family was treated unfairly no matter how long you fought for your country. African Americans fought in wars side by side of whites and yet still get treated unfairly just because they have darker skin. I think that segregation is sort of like communism, no matter how hard you fight you cannot reach a higher even in life.
There are certain events in the United States’ past that bring great embarrassment to its citizens. One of these embarrassing black marks on the United States’ not so perfect record is slavery. The unbelievably cruel treatment of black men, women, and children seems unreal, and the way that people lawfully treated other human beings as property is disgraceful. When the United States’ founding fathers declared independence from Britain in 1776 slavery was not the issue at hand, and it took almost ninety years of change, and four years of bloodshed caused by a civil war for the abolition of slavery to occur. However, the mistreatment of African Americans did not stop there, as U.S. citizens continued to stain the canvas of U.S. history with unequal
There was a grim future awaiting African Americans segregation, lynching, race riots, and what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the problem of the color line.” (Takaki, 7) There was still discrimination awaiting and there was cruel segregation of schools, work, and housing making difficult times for African Americans to start their lives after slavery. Post-racial society does not exist when people have the same opportunity socially, economically, and political. We see today there are little diversity in politics and that we still see white people as good and powerful and blacks as criminals and