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African Americans During The Reconstruction Era

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African Americans During The Reconstruction Era
In the 1860s, the American Civil War occurred due to disagreements between the North and the South, including their perceptions on slavery. The North was victorious, which led to the transformation of the South after their loss, better known as the Reconstruction Era. A primary concept during this period was the idea of equality of all. The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments were passed to make the United States a nation where people will not be discriminated based on their race- something they cannot control. Despite discrimination being illegal, most white Southerners refused to treat African Americans as equivalent to themselves. Former slaves underwent restrictions as to their interaction with whites, their ability to vote, …show more content…
This organization focused on their ideas of white supremacy and the oppression of every other race, primarily African Americans. This group is well-known for the immense amount of acts of terrorism they committed, which includes the more notorious act of lynching. Members of this group did not want to just murder African Americans, they wanted to destroy any dignity they had, and so lynching was rather favorable. This terrorist act would occur in public, from a tree, so anyone could witness it. Victims would take more than a couple of minutes to die, therefore, their last sight would be of people who would murder them with smiles on their faces. The Ku Klux Klan was a group that concentrated on inflicting pain on African Americans through various hate crimes, especially …show more content…
The implementation of the Jim Crow laws gave white Southerners the idea that it was acceptable to disobey the laws that were meant to provide liberty to all slaves. The laws stated that whites were the superior race, enabling whites of power to make it impossible for former slaves to vote by instilling poll taxes and literacy tests. These laws told Americans that inequality should be supported, causing the Ku Klux Klan to form. The creation of this white supremacist group led to the beliefs that executing hate crimes is an enjoyable activity, and there is nothing wrong with publically stripping one of their dignity by lynching them. The Reconstruction Era was meant to give African Americans the rights they never had, but the rights they acquired were taken from them almost immediately
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