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Reconstruction and Race Relations – Final Paper

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Reconstruction and Race Relations – Final Paper

Reconstruction and Race Relations Paper
William H. Orris
Professor Ralph Millsap
HIS105021VA016-1138-001: Contemporary U.S. History
November 6, 2013, 2013

Reconstruction and Race Relations

Abstract

This paper explores race relations amongst the people after the Civil War and during the Reconstruction era of the nineteenth century. The Southern whites tried to maintain their status quo of supremacy. The following will describe techniques that the southern whites used in an effort to keep the south as it was in the antebellum. Laws were enacted to protect the civil rights of the freed people and those born in the United States. In some case these laws were stricken down by the Supreme Court. Laws were also created in the south to minimize the freedoms of the newly freed people. These laws were called “Black Codes” and “Jim Crow Laws.” In America’s south was the first domestic terrorist group the Ku Klux Klan which started as a social club in Tennessee. This paper will describe some of the issues that started in the nineteenth century and carry on today.

In the south the wealthy and politically connected white people refused to let go of their way of life after the Civil War. The southerners did all they could to maintain a status quo. In their minds the war did not change anything. After the Civil War the white southern power structure used the following techniques to make the exercise of freedom for the former slaves challenging. The first technique I will discuss is a political fashion when the local and state governments in the south instituted Jim Crow Laws and Black Codes. Jim Crow Laws and Black Codes limited black Americans’ capacity to dispute inequalities. Essentially the former slaves were now free from slavery; however these instituted laws of inequality

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