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Political Participation During The Reconstruction Era

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Many historians, researchers, politicians, and scholars have considered reconstruction as turning point for the ratification of equality laws that would eliminate racial segregation for equally rights. However, a close follow-up of the controversial developments that occurred immediately after the end of the Civil War in 1865 indicates dissimilarity. The reconstruction era might have made a history of enabling African Americans to vote and become state legislatures, but some major political personnel consider Reconstruction as a failure, which led to non-ending political controversies, murder, and assaults indicating general failure. Robert Smalls and Wade Hampton are some of the major political people who participated in the continuity of the Reconstruction era and their actions and words prove its failure, as explored in this study. However, their consideration of black freedom contrast because Smalls demonstrates the harmful actions of …show more content…

Although they both express the failure, each person acts as a representative of the two competing sides concerning whether or not to allow former slaves and other African Americans to live under full civil rights as whites. Smalls demonstrated how continued massacres, assaults, and whippings of blacks clearly proved that the signs of ending slavery by allowing them in state legislation and voting was a simple cover-up because they were never given the opportunity to enjoy their rights as whites. On the contrary, Hampton worked hard to prove that blacks were never qualified for the same rights as those of native white Americans. Hampton’s political-instigated support of malign activities of extremists such as Red Shirts and the Ku Klux Klan against blacks indicated made clear indication that Reconstruction could never have worked for people who just came to America as

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