Civil War Reconstruction

3 Pages 699 Words

Over the last 138 years, we as a nation have fumbled with the notion of freedmen and their role in society after the Civil War. Until the civil rights movement we looked back on Lincoln’s legacy of Reconstruction carried out by President Johnson as a noble step towards a truly free society. Until the mid 1900s it was clear who were the instigators and supporters of the Reconstruction. Andrew Johnson’s clear and “brave battle” towards Reconstruction targeted the carpetbaggers and the scalawags as corrupt people who took advantage of a devastated southern economy. I suppose they assumed after a time of war, it is wrong to pursue capitalism and opportunity (carpetbaggers) and see the potential of a new open opportunistic government (scalawags). Their egos and status clouded the vision of our government from seeing black people as they are-equal citizens of earth.
Whites thought of them as children who couldn’t handle the complexity of co-running our government, when in fact we couldn’t handle or maybe were even a little intimidated by the complexity and potential of our African American brothers. It’s not surprising that the loudest voice of the time, our government, won the support bred from white propaganda that everything will be fine and the black man is free and happy.
As unfair as it sounds, it took our black community nearly seventy-five years to gain the status and respect, making them a credible source of what the reconstruction really meant to blacks. In 1935, a black historian and activist by the name of W.E.B. Du Bois produced and released his view, the African American view, on what the Reconstruction Era really entailed. He entitled his book Black Reconstruction in America. Although his book was ignored by most historians, this was just the foundation of the social change that was to occur in the next five decades. If we could go back in time and ask a white politician the political status of the b...