Essay On African Americans Freedom

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Freedom can mean different things for different people, but most African Americans felt the same after the Civil War as they hoped for freedom. During the reconstruction period following the Civil War, blacks got a taste of that freedom, before it was snatched from their grasps when the reconstruction period ended. African Americans faced hated groups like the KKK, harsh rules like the Black Codes and the Jim Crow Laws and the impossible task of trying to earn money for themselves through sharecropping. Despite being classified as free men, African Americans cannot be considered free because of the oppression and unequal treatment they faced. When the reconstruction era ended, Southerners jumped at the opportunity to take away the rights …show more content…

These rules include things like segregation, laws on voting and many more. African Americans were not allowed to “rent or keep a house within the limits of the town under any circumstances” or “permitted to preach, exhort, or otherwise declaim to congregations of colored people without a special permission” (Black Codes from Opelousas). These laws show the limitations blacks faced in the South because of the rules imposed by the white Southerners. The later formed Jim Crow Laws, first passed in Tennessee in 1881, were a more formal set of regulations that stopped African Americans from having full access to their freedoms. African Americans were forced to go through obsard tests that they almost never passed when attempting to register to vote. The whites in town however, either easily passed the test or didn't have to take it at all. Not only that, but the Jim Crow Laws also enforced segregation in the US, by forcing blacks and whites onto separate train cars, those dedicated to the blacks were in poor condition and much less clean (Textbook section 13.4). All laws included in the Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws, limited the freedoms of African Americans and made it impossible for them to decide anything