Despite the early successes of the Reconstruction era, the movement should be considered a failure. The goals of Reconstruction were to rebuild the economy of the South while successfully integrating the newly freed slaves into the culture and marketplace of the United States. The effort failed on both parts. The gap in wealth between the North and South had widened even more by the turn of the Twentieth Century. Additionally, African-Americans were only slightly better...
Despite the early successes of the Reconstruction era, the movement should be considered a failure. The goals of Reconstruction were to rebuild the economy of the South while successfully integrating the newly freed slaves into the culture and marketplace of the United States. The effort failed on both parts. The gap in wealth between the North and South had widened even more by the turn of the Twentieth Century. Additionally, African-Americans were only slightly better off than before the Civil War.
Despite the best efforts of the Radical Republicans in Congress to protect the rights of the Freedman, Southern Democrats opposed any social change for the black people of the South. By the end of Reconstruction, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were not worth the paper they were written on. Black codes were established to deny basic civil liberties to the freedmen. A system of sharecropping and tenant farming kept the African-Americans on the plantations with little hope for upward social mobility. Schools and other social institutions were segregated. Due to poll taxes and terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, black people could not even secure the most basic of democratic rights: the ability to vote. Black Americans, while making significant political strides in the early 1870's, had lost everything with the Compromise of 1877.
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