Problems of the Reconstruction after the American Civil War.

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                Sean McDonald

        Unit 1 Paper Assignment        12/22/09

In 1860, eleven Southern states of America seceded, creating the Confederate States of America. Abraham Lincoln was elected that year, and was a man who was adamant about containing the Union. The Confederacy attacked the U.S. at Fort Sumter, prompting Lincoln’s war on the South, in his attempt to force them back into the Union. America then fought a bloody Civil War, with the victor ultimately being the North. After this long and destructive war, many things needed to be done, but, unfortunately, many negative things came as a result. Some of these things that came as a result were the attempt to continue the oppression of blacks, despite their newly given rights, war-torn land destroyed the agrarian economy of the South, and the U.S. faced huge conflict within the government over slavery, equal rights and how to fix the South.

First, during the period after the war, called reconstruction, racism was more than ever active, as blacks were gaining rights, and the prejudiced white groups of the South did not like this. One big example of this was the rise of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). This group was publicly and excessively racist, committing crimes such as public lynchings and terrorist activities including bombings. Another such group was the White League, whose goal was the rebellion and takeover of America, under their white-rule ideals. Yet another example was not a group, but a set of laws meant to deny blacks in the South their civil rights, these laws were named the “Jim Crow Laws”. These things show how blacks were treated after reconstruction in the South, and why it was worse than slavery.

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Now, blacks were free after the war, slavery was outlawed, but it took a while for them to gain their full civil rights. The aforementioned “Jim Crow Laws”, were not broken down and outlawed until late in the 1900s. It took leaders like Martin Luther King Junior acting out for these things to come to the full attention of the government.  It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the Jim Crow Laws were overruled and full rights were given to all men and women, nearly 90 years after the end ...

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