The period of reconstruction was seen as a failure. WEB Dubois in his "Black Reconstruction in America" (1935) "The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." Eric Foner, in his assertion regarding the black perspective, "Reconstruction must be judged failure… it was a noble flawed experiment, the first attempt to introduce a genuine inter-racial democracy in the United States" (255-256). Other such as Booker T. Washington asserted that the reconstruction failed because it started from the wrong premise and in the wrong place. He asserted that reconstruction was political and targeted civil rights when the real focus should have been self-determination and economic equality. During this time in American history the Ku Klux Klan was glorified as white vigilantes, romanticizing the notion of torturing black people. According to T. Harry Williams,
Reconstruction was a battle between two extremes:
the Democrats as the group which included the vast majority of the whites, standing for decent government and racial supremacy, versus the Republicans, the Negroes, alien carpetbaggers, and renegade scalawags, standing for dishonest government and alien ideals. These historians wrote literally in terms of white and black (473).
With civil rights in the 1960's came the official re-instatement of rights to Blacks in America, to some degree. There is question as to what the motivation was for this move, but some would like to suggest that it was the notion of freedom and liberty for all that prompted this swing in the way in which things transpired. However, history also reveals that not all White Americans were into the notion of freedom and liberty for all as many considered Blacks to be less than fully human, or deserve the full rights of citizenship....
Again, fights and battles ensued for something that was suppose to be "free" and a right of every citizen of America. Although Blacks did not come to America of their own free will, they were significant in establishing a country that they were not welcomed as a part of. Even in the movement of civil rights, freedom continued to be illusive for many.
Conclusion
Freedom in America has been laden with ideals, notions, philosophies and ideologies that continue to prove elusive up until the present time. Although there have been some liberties 'afforded' to those whose rights were initially stolen and denied to them, the continuation of systematic disenfranchisement and institutionalized racism that has matriculated from primarily focused on Blacks to many other ethnic groups haunts America's legacy. There is an illusion of freedom and an illusion of liberty and justice for all. Moreover, those who have written the history books and those who continue to try to paint America as the land of the free and home of the brave are in denial of the very history they write about. America has never been truly about freedom for all. It has been freedom for some. White skin privilege continues to dictate, for the most part, what real opportunities and real freedoms are afforded to those who possess this physical characteristic. Freedom? This notion in America still remains a questionable contingency.
References
DuBois, W. (1935). Black reconstruction in America, 1860 to 1880. New York, NY: The
Free Press.
Foner, Eric. (1988) Reconstruction: America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877. New
York, NY: Harper and Row.
Williams, T. (1946). An analysis of some Reconstruction attitudes. Journal of Southern History,
12(4), 469-486.
