Injustice to Minorities

Reconstruction's failure has caused a large sum of people over the years to overestimate the degree of equality that African Americans have had. There is a constant law of history that history itself, like time, never ceases moving forward, also in social issues like tolerance and understanding. I think this might be true in the present to a certain degree — there is no debate that we're more equal to minorities right now than the people of the past were — but it paints a pretty picture over the fact that history is filled with just as many setbacks as it has progresses.

If you were not aware that the Reconstruction in the South was a tremendous failure, and you forget all the other latent chains on blacks during this time, you wind up asking yourself, "We gave freedom to these people. Did the just sit around for a hundred years?". The answer is, they fought for many of the rights which they had for a brief amount of time but were taken away from them by the black codes. They were able to marry whoever they pleased after reconstruction, more or less (some states such as Virginia had some very strict definitions as to what was a black person and what was white). The right for black people to marry whites was not recognized by America until 1967, for an outrageous example.

While slavery was sort of abolished, reconstruction gave birth to a system called sharecropping, which was almost as unfair as the "peculiar institution" in the past. It bound by contract not only freedmen, but also poor blacks and whites. Landowners unjustly tried to convince freedmen, poor blacks, and poor whites into signing contracts to work fields. These contracts set terms that nearly bound the signer to permanent and unrestricted labor. Sounds like slavery, if you ask me. These farmers weren't literal slaves anymore. They weren't at risk of being sold to another plantation at the decision of their plantation owner.