Reconstruction: An Era Of The Reconstruction Era

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Reconstruction can be perceived to be an era where all actions made abided the documents made earlier in history and it could be truly taken that way when the North was still in the South. As soon as the Northern troops were pulled from the South, it went to the way it had been and some of the decisions ended up going against the amendments and other written rules. In the Constitution it is written “All men are created equal” if this was true then why were black codes established in the South to restrict the rights that African Americans were given? The codes ensured that even though slavery was abolished, African Americans were still available for labor. According to History.com, many states required blacks to sign yearly labor contracts and if they refused, it resulted in either arrest, fines or forced labor. According to PBS.com in 1871, the government passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which gave the government to take action on the terrorist groups. The Ku Klux Klan started off as just former confederates and eventually turned into a terrorist group full of people that believed in white supremacy. They felt the only way to show the supremacy was brutally torturing and or killing African Americans because of their race. Though the act on the KKK was created when the Panic of 1873 occurred, all attention from the North made its way …show more content…

One of those main “attempts” was sharecropping, where the whites would give the African Americans a portion of land for them to be able to grow crops. It can be taken as “Oh, that’s nice of the South,” but a person with some common sense would realize that there has to be a catch. The catch of that deal was that the African Americans had to give half of the crops to the actual landowner and usually the money made went to pay off debts. There really wasn’t income out of sharecropping unless the African American found some way around the whole