Essay On Black Experience During Reconstruction

Black Experience during the Reconstruction Era
Throughout American history, black American people were treated unequally and unfairly by the White people. The Reconstruction Era was one of the most significant time period in history for the blacks. During the Reconstruction Era, America went through many political changes and changed the lives of the black American people. The Reconstruction Era was the time period after the American Civil War, during the years 1863 to 1877. This time period is called the Reconstruction because after the Civil War, the government needed to rebuild the South, “putting back the pieces”. During the Reconstruction, three amendments were added to the Constitution to regulate and establish equality for black Americans,

After the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment, southern states instituted a series of laws known as Black Codes. Many Northerners saw these codes as the beginning to restore slavery. The Black Codes granted certain legal rights to black Americans. It granted black people the right to marry, own property, and testify in court, but it also prohibited black Americans to serve on juries, to own or carry weapons, and to serve in state militias. According to the Black Codes, black former slaves, also known as freedmen, were forced to sign labor contracts with their employers or white landowners. Any freedmen who attempted to violate or refuse these labor contracts could be fined, beaten, arrested, and hired out for work. As a consequence of the Civil War, many former slaves lost their jobs, and planters needed laborers, which later led to the creation of sharecropping. Sharecropping is a system in which the landowner allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of crop, rather than wages. Sharecropping replaced slavery and the plantation system destroyed by the Civil War. After the war, many black Southerners rented land from the white landowners and raised crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice. Many Northerners headed to the South looking for opportunities to make money and to gain political power during the Reconstruction Era, these people were known as the Carpetbaggers. They were called as Carpetbaggers because they arrived to the South with a carpetbag, which stored all of their possessions inside. There were another group of people who also sought for opportunities for financial gain and personal political power as the Carpetbaggers, which were the Scalawags. The Scalawags were white people born in the South who were considered as traitors to the Southerners, because they cooperate with the Republicans and supported