Reconstruction

Amendments to the Constitution

• 13th Abolished Slavery 1865
• 14th Grants citizenship 1868
• 15th Grants formerly enslaved men the right to vote 1870

The Black Experience – Goals

• Reunite families
• Work – economic independence
• Landownership
• Education
• Control over their own churches

Freedom

• Was not truly freedom
• Difficult and uncertain
• No money
• Limited or no education
• Confronted with racism

Family

• First goal was to reunite and stabilize families
  • Legalize marriages
  • Locate lost family members
• Between 70 and 90 percent of black families were two-parent families in the postbellum period
• Family stability was important and unattainable under enslavement

Work

• Working for whites resembled slavery
• More Black women than white women worked outside of the home
  • Black male underemployment or unemployment forced black women into wage labor
  • Had to supplement male income
• Worked in fields or as domestic servants
  • Urban – domestic work
  • Rural – farm / field work
• Also took in washing, ironing and other services

Changes within the Plantation Home

• Radical shift in power and gender relations
• Negotiations regarding work
• The ability to fire and to quit changed dynamic

Education

• Hope for the future was concentrated on children
• Black mothers supported their children’s schooling
• Northern teachers traveled to teach in the South
• Black teachers

Religion

• Under slavery, Black folks were forbidden to hold services without a white preacher present
• New black churches became the center of the emerging black community
• Worked to create some of the first black schools

Creating a New Identity

• Female domesticity was ideal but not always attainable
• White folks who worked with newly freed slaves promoted white ideals
• Becoming a “true woman”

Negative Reaction

• Rise of the KKK
• Lynching
• Terrorist tactics were used to restore white supremacy and to control black’s behavior
• Black Codes
• Jim Crow

Ida B. Wells

• Journalist and Activist
• Born into slavery to enslaved parents
• Wrote about race and politics in the South
• Led an anti-lynching crusade beginning in the 1890s
• Founding member:
  
  • National Association of Colored Women (NACW)
  • National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

The Struggle Continues

• Many of the problems dealt with during Reconstruction continued well into the 20th and 21st centuries