Segregation During The Reconstruction Era

Segregation, oppression, and injustice are only a sliver of what African Americans experienced during the Reconstruction Era. This was a period of time to “rebuild” the United States post Civil War and emancipation proclamation (Reconstruction PowerPoint 1/7/16), but it wasn’t a community building exercise. The “rebuilding” process was arduous and did not give African Americans freedom and equality that many so adamantly believed would be a reality following WWI (1920s, WWI, Segregation PowerPoint 2/7/16). Kevin Boyle’s description of race relations during the 1920s portrays how freedom was not a reality that through migration, violence, and segregation African Americans were not free. Even though, they were free from the the cotton fields

(1920s, WWI, Segregation PowerPoint 2/7/16). This migration was one of the biggest factors of contention between African Americans and whites. Racism was just as cruel in the North as in the South. African Americans in the the North during the time of the migration caused whites in urban cites to feel a sense of insecurity, “the very changes that made the cities glitter triggered a backlash so bitter that the nation’s great metropolises skidded toward their own version of Jim Crow” (Boyle 6). With the influx of African Americans and immigrants the white Anglo-Saxon society of the North felt threatened. In their backlash they segregated blacks in every way they could. “Many employers decided that all but the most menial and dangerous work be reserved for whites” (Boyle 9). African Americans although taking a risk and hoping for an improved life were just being taken advantage of forced to work the jobs that were unsafe, but yet their only way of income. Similarly, the South had oppressed blacks in a similar fashion after the Reconstruction Era forcing them to sign labor contracts and work in conditions comparable to slavery. Their freedom was no different in the North than in the South post emancipation proclamation which was a document declaring

“Ford’s extremism fed fires of xenophobia smoldering among the the city’s Anglo-Saxon minority, blending anti-Semitism with anti-Catholicism, nativism, and a deepening racism. Detroit’s cops, themselves overwhelmingly native-born whites, were almost as likely to rough up foreign-born and colored suspects as they were to arrest them” (Boyle 104). This just shows how the leading economic participants were fueling hatred of races and advancing the white superiority complex oppressing the freedom of African Americans. Even individuals that are supposed to be protecting their citizens are harming and arresting them because of the color of their skin. This was a time period where lynching was prevalent “extrajudicial “execution” by a mob, generally in the form of a hanging, shooting, or burning. This terror of violence was spurred by the KKK that expanded its influence as far as the North and west” (1920s, WWI, Segregation PowerPoint 2/7/16). Violence didn’t just end there. “A prominent negro attorney, caught up in the force’s crackdown, was dragged out of his car and searched at gunpoint by a snarling cop” (Boyle 121). Being forceful and grabbing a man out of his car to search him is wrong. Boyle shows that these violent actions were not of just KKK members, but individuals of society who believed they were superior and continued to deny the rights and