Reconstruction Video

I would have thought that Emancipation Proclamation ended most of the suffering that

black people experienced during the 1800s. As it turns out, I was mistaken as not only did their quality of life not improve that much if at all, new laws would be implimented to lessen black Americans quality of life. When watching Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, my viewpoint changed and I better understood the struggles freed Americans faced in the following decades after the Civil War. The period of Reconstruction was underway but it was an excruciatingly slow process that the President after Lincoln, Andrew Johnson did not really assist with, in fact, he made it worse by regressing some of the progress that was made.

The creation of Black Codes also posed a threat to the Reconstruction era by not allowing blacks to be equal along with having it be perfectly acceptable for them to be treated significantly worse than whites for years to come. Black people were also convinced or forced to sign contracts of labor with white people or face a fine for becoming a vagrant of their city. Black workers could and did on several occasions end up back in jail and then be forced to work for another white man to pay off the fine they were given. The Emancipation Proclamation was trying to avoid this kind of situation because it is essentially a kind of slavery but I believe the proper term is indentured servitude. I believe the Reconstruction was then assisted by having military occupants placed in the south to make sure that black people were treated more fairly.