How Did African Americans Differ Through The Institution Of Radical Reconstruction

After the Civil War, the United States tried to mend the relationship between the Union and Confederacy through the institution of reconstruction under Johnson. President Johnson established minimal requirements that created much controversy between the Congressmen supporting that supported the Union during the war. Ultimately, Johnson acted in protecting poor whites since there was now an abundant supply of cheap labor with slavery no longer being enacted. Slowly with the reintegration of the South, there were state laws created to repress African Americans since they were now the population that was in the majority in comparison to whites. The population grew due to freed African Americans in the South, whites saw that the racially-structured

Black communities in the south changed the status quo through the construction of black churches and schoolhouses that would be the center of communal activities. The black community repressed their enslaved past and self-empowered their communities in the post-emancipated world. White vigilantes saw these actions as a threat, thus created violence by “…burned down black churches and schoolhouses and drove off repugnant teachers and minsters.” These black community centers were a threat of the Ku Klux Klan even though it was in the beginning stages of growing in power. The assembly of the black communal centers became a crucial tactic of the Klan members that took advantage to implement violent methods of torture to a large group of African Americans. African Americans who were recently freed began to educate themselves in schoolhouses were threaten because historically the South was largely populated by Democrats, thus shifted the balance of power if black voters exercised their political power. Activist deterred the violence through the empowerment of the African American voters despite the violence that

Violence targeted at these communities was indiscriminate and genderless because white supporters of the Republican party helped black communities endured violence. The mutilation of men to suppress their manhood and publicly humiliated them in growing Republican towns. Hahn states, “…the Klan not only brutalized and murdered but also often enacted rituals of degradation or emasculation.” The Klan members’ brutal beatings represented their superiority in manhood in comparison to the Republican black and white members. Schoolteachers that were founded to be advocates of the black communities would be reprimanded. The difference here was race in which the punishment differed because white schoolteachers could escape the threats meanwhile black schoolteachers could not. Humiliation tactics of whipping and killing black schoolteachers as a punishment would remind them where they socially belonged and deflect them from fighting back. Hahn described the killing of white man named Outlaw who had been mutilated in front of everyone and the Klan attached a note stating, “Beware you guilty both white and black.” The Klan discouraged communities from changing the status quo and integrating African Americans into the community. The brutalization of the bodies were method of violence to refrain citizens from changing the dynamics of the