“I saw over twelve colored men and women, beat, shot and hung between there and Shreveport,” former slave Henry Adams writes. After the Civil War, the legal institution of slavery was abolished unless used as a just punishment. Additionally, these “freedmen” were naturalized and made citizens of the United States which allegedly granted them equal protections, whatever color or race, would have; and, they were granted black male suffrage. Some may argue that African Americans were free after the Civil War for the obvious reasons of a document stating so. However, African Americans were not free post-Antebellum era because they were deprived of their rights as “Americans citizens” through the institution Black Codes and the continuation of …show more content…
In his statement, he recalls four white men apprehending him after leaving the premises of his former owner without a pass, traveling alone. These men, “struck me [Adams] with a stick and told me they were going to kill me and every other Negro who told them that they did not belong to anyone”. (Document C). In this case, the sense of belonging is not a positive one to find oneself but rather a negative implication of slave-like conditions even after the institution of slavery was outlawed. Moreover, even the wife of his former owner asked for reverence and proper language. She said, “You should say ‘master’. You all are not free… and you shall call every white lady ‘missus’ and every white man ‘master.’” (). The idea of being free is evidently not there since whites remain ignorant of the struggles of blacks in an Anglo-American society and continue to degrade them by thinking of them as inferior and unimportant to the success of the nation. Whites continue to stress that blacks are to ask in order to do; sure, laws were barely placed after the Civil War, but if a person is to call a former slave owner “master” and former slave catchers are still catching and assassinating blacks, the question is posed if there has been any change at all after slavery and any involuntary servitude was outlawed with the 13th Amendment. African Americans are forced to stay where they are if not without permission; they are forced to be cowards with fears of being hung and killed, cowards enslaved mentally in the contradictory “land of the free and home of the