1865-1877: The Era of Reconstruction
"The Emancipation of the Negroes, January, 1863—The Past and the Future"
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Immediately after the Civil War, what is known as the Reconstruction Congress passed Amendments to the Constitution abolishing slavery and indentured servitude (13th), granting African Americans full citizenship and equal rights under the law (14th), and providing voting protection rights regardless of race, color, or previous status as an enslaved man (15th). Early Reconstruction efforts empowered African Americans to own land, build communities, form churches, vote for government officials, and send their children to school (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 22). As historian Eric Foner (2014) noted, “[B]lacks were active agents in the making of Reconstruction” (p. xxii.) He goes further to say that the extent to which free Black men and women engaged in rebuilding their communities “was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experience in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century” (p. xxiii). Unfortunately, that “radical” experience did not last long.