Quote: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
The era of reconstruction in American history has attracted a myriad of controversies, mainly regarding its significance to African Americans. Precisely, until the civil war, there was widespread discrimination accepted as a norm among citizens. At the time, the Blacks occupied a position in society where there were considered second class citizens and thus not eligible for equal status with the predominant white majority. As such, in the post-civil war reconstruction era, proclamations of freeing slaves who served in the war were a moment of basking in the sun as W.E. Dubois puts it. However, the tensions between the northerners and the southerners became a critical factor that threatened to jeopardize the new forms of freedom. They felt like the northerners we imposing ideologies on them after their victory in the civil war harmonize America.
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In retrospect, the quote offers an accurate account of the period that African Americans enjoyed their equality status. For example, after the civil war, the Union army's presence helped to ensure that confederate southerners honored the terms of the victory, including acknowledging the freedom of the slaves who served in the war. However, shortly after the civil war, the hostility against the African Americans resumed. As Brinkley (1993) observes, African Americans were denied equal rights to education, health care, and employment opportunities not just in the South but across the country. Other forms of discrimination included the revival of gang labor policies among the Southerners that objectively exploited African Americans(Brinkley, 1993). The compromise of reconstruction to allow autonomy among southerners allowed them to return to their previous habits of treating African Americans as slaves. Their rights of land ownership fraudulently abused in the South, and wage policies of the colored citizens became skewed in favor of the landowners. In a nutshell, as W.E. Dubois captures in the quote, reconstruction created an environment where African Americans only enjoyed their freedom for a brief period as the arguments above indicate.
To conclude, the quote accurately describes the African American experience in the reconstruction era in the context of their freedom, equality, and access to economic opportunities. Reconstruction policies compromised the rights of the African American community, especially in the South.
References
Brinkley, A. (1993). The unfinished nation: A concise history of the American people .
