In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation gave freedom to all of the blacks. However, the road to freedom for the blacks was still going to be a long one and would not start until after the end of the Civil War. The Reconstruction definitely failed in bringing social and economic equality to the blacks because of; the failure of the Freedman’s Bureau, the blacks were kept from voting, and they were treated unfairly.
To start with, the Freedman’s Bureau failed. At the beginning, the Bureau was allotted a certain amount of money by Congress to help the blacks. The blacks had been slaves for so long that they just did not know what to do now, since they had received their freedom. At first, the goal of the Bureau was to give each black family between forty and sixty acres, some food, clothing, and an education. However the money that they had been given soon ran out and when it was taken back to President Johnson, he refused to give them more money. Therefore, the Freedman’s Bureau was only able to educate about 250,000 of the over four million blacks. That gave a small number of blacks a head start on the others and that head start would be noticeable for years and years to come. Because of the illiteracy of the blacks, they had a hard time finding jobs and holding government positions. If the Bureau had been given more money, it might have been a big help to the backs, but as it was, it did not help very much and the majority of the blacks were still illiterate.
The Essay on American Revolution Government Started Money
AMERICAN REVOLUTION Was the American revolution revolutionary? That was the question given to us by you to discuss and decide on a position, hence position paper. Well to fully answer this you have to know what is a revolution. The dictionary states that a revolution is an attempt to overthrow of one government and its replacement with another#. There have been many revolutions in history like the ...
Another failure of Reconstruction was that most of the blacks were kept from voting. The blacks in the south had a real hard time trying to vote. The whites just would not let them. The national government finally said that if they were not going to let the blacks vote, then some of their representation in Congress would be taken away. This made the whites change their ways and find more sly ways of preventing the blacks from voting. There were three main ways they stopped the blacks from voting. The first one was called the Grandfathers Clause. It stated that in order for one to vote, their grandfather had to have been able to vote. The next one was poll tax. The whites would simply just charge the blacks around a dollar to vote and charge the whites around a penny. Last of all, there was the literacy test. For this one, voters had to answer a question in order to vote. Simple questions were given to the whites such as, “Can you write an “X”?” However, the blacks were given much harder questions like, “What was the most famous concerto of Tchaikovsky?” and, “How many symphonies did Beethoven write?” Since the blacks could not possibly know the answers to such questions, they were kept from voting.
Last of all, the blacks were treated very unfairly. It was during this time that General Forest started the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK, as it was known, would torment the blacks, burn crosses in black’s yards, burn down their churches, and even go so far as to hang some of them. If by chance a black was elected to a government position, such as a mayor, then the KKK would focus their cruelty on that person. However, not only the KKK was so cruel to the blacks. It was very hard for the newly freed slaves to find work. For this reason, they would walk down the streets trying to find a job. While looking for a job, they would be picked up off the street and arrested for vagrancy or loitering. The punishments for such a crime were outrageous. They would be sentenced to work for a certain amount of time. Most of the time they were sent to their old owners to do labor for them. During this time, they were paid very little, if at all. It was definitely unfair for the blacks.
The Term Paper on The Black Vote African Americans As An Interest Group
The Black Vote: African Americans as an Interest Group The African-American community is comprised of 34 million people, and makes up approximately 12. 8 percent of the American population (Barker, Jones, Tate 1999: 3). As such, it is the largest minority group in the United States. Yet, politically, the black community has never been able to sufficiently capitalize on that status in order to ...
When it comes down to it, because of the failure of the Freedman’s Bureau, the fact that the blacks were prevented from voting, and they were treated very unfairly, the Reconstruction failed in bringing blacks social and economic equality. Since blacks were so poorly educated then, they still do not hold as many high positions in government or business today. Even since the blacks have become more and more equal to whites it will probably still be many years until there is a black President of the United States.
