African American history from 1865 to the present

¶ … reconstruction were disappointing in that they did not complete the liberation of Blacks in the wake of the Civil War. While the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and the 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to blacks, many of the hard-won gains of blacks who fought during the War were lost in concessions by President Andrew Johnson as he gave lands back to pardoned Southern former Confederates. Not only such former Confederates were given back land and pardoned, but land that had been given to freed Blacks were confiscated and given back to Whites who came back (D. Hine, W. Hine & S. Harold (Eds.), 2010, 311-312).

With the rollback of the gains of freed blacks who had received land came Jim Crow laws that limited Blacks access to voting and forced them to sign labor contracts with White owners. Unfortunately, it was largely a failure from the view of abolitionists and blacks. It was a success for the South and the North because they saw compromise on black emancipation as healing the rift between North and South (ibid., 339-340).. Frankly, Reconstruction should not have been hard. The hangmen's noose for higher ranking Confederates might have scared them into surrender. Johnson's policies only encouraged their violence.

Question #3

Lynching was associated with re-institution of White supremacy in the South after 1865 and the end of the Civil War. The initial granting of civil rights to Black under Reconstruction era raised anxieties amongst white. They came to blame blacks for their wartime hardships, losses and reduced status. Blacks and Whites who were activists were often lynched in the South during this time. As shown already in the first essay question, to explain the outbreak of lynching across the South after Reconstruction, one needs to see that the administration of President Andrew Johnson who had made it quite apparent by his pro-Confederate policies that he had absolutely no intention (ibid., 311-312).

With no prominent Confederates being substantially punished for their war crimes, there was no break on lynching. Whites justified it as a way to save Southern culture, keep the Blacks in their place, prevent the mixing of the races and a number of other issues. The rise of Ku Klux Klan came directly out of this maelstrom (ibid, 333-335). Anti-lynching really got a successful start under W.E.B. DuBois whose NAACP in the 1920's helped to combat lynching by publishing the facts by organizing support for a national campaign against the atrocity (DuBois, 2010).

Question #4-

In the case of W.E.B. Dubois, he understood the nature of education as an instrument of repression to blacks. What is especially prescient about this is his insightful view of education for poor working class whites as an instrument of propaganda to justify prejudice. However, as Dubois relates, even intelligent white people have been brought to believe that somehow they are a special people who are chosen to spread culture and technology to all of the darker people of the world. This "education" convinces the white person to give up their sons for wars that oppress the dark peoples, votes money for the wars, makes him believe he should make up the lynch mobs and to oppress blacks with Jim Crow. The fact that his philosophy was realistic was because it was the activism of his NAACP exposing the reality of lynching in the South in the 1920s It was very realistic, because the in their face activism was what was reversing the trends in the South. Other African-Americans such as Washington saw him as a radical, but he know how to get what he wanted from the white through activism in the NAACP (DuBois, 2010).