Today in class we went over the aftermath of the War, which included the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Also included was share cropping, Jim Crow laws, and the infamous KKK.
We started off recapping about the end of the Civil War, how there was two ideas of attempting to fix the separation in the United States. One way was Restoration; restoring the United States to the way it was before the War. This type of fixing heavily favored the South because it let them mostly keep their way of life. The other way that was considered was Reconstruction. The example used to establish a difference was the example of an old and broken chair. Restoration would be polishing, re-coating the chair. Reconstructing would be destroying the chair and rebuilding it how you wanted it.
The 13th Amendment was passed, but with the Amendment holding back many specific details that would be added in the 14th and 15th, but it allowed Southerns to take control of "free" black people is such ways like Share-Cropping.
Share-Cropping: Give blacks land, have they pay in crops, oh wait they don't have crops to start off with, LOAN them crops, ???, Free labor. Basically.
The 14th amendment gave naturally born people (including former slaves) citizenship...which helped a bit? It didn't have a very large impact on anything.
The 15th says that you can't not let someone vote based on race, color, or previous status of servitude. What happened instead was that the White American Southern Protestants (W.A.S.P. for short), gave people 'literacy tests'. Since the majority of black people didn't have education, it was easy to prevent them from voting.
It wasn't until 60 years later Martin Luther King Jr. started his movement.
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