What happened to African Americans in the south after reconstruction?

Answer 1

After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson became president. He was a man who had no sympathy for the newly freed black slaves and was a staunch southern supporter. As a result, he decimated agencies like The Freedmen's Bureau, removed federal troops from former Confederate cities and declared Reconstruction at an end. Southerners who were angry at the former slaves, somehow believing this was all their fault, proceeded to take away any rights they had acquired.

Answer 2

After Reconstruction ended, African Americans lost the protection of the troops. Many states passed Jim Crow laws reversing the progress made during Reconstruction. Some African Americans left the South for the North and West. Some stayed to become sharecroppers on plantations where they had formerly been slaves, entering a new kind of bondage to the land.

Answer 3

African Americans in certain circumstances never were able to fully exercise the rights they had under Federal law. In the South, fear and murders helped to keep Blacks from voting. Only during the Union troop occupations in various Southern states did Black votes count for anything. Better said in an other way, the Republican congress believed that Black suffrage was a key element for broadening political power in the South. Specifically they counted on Blacks for voting for Republicans.

The results in the South of the well meaning Republican acts, flared into white violence against Blacks in the South.

Threats and violence did not keep some Blacks from the voting places in all of the South. For a brief period of time, and very brief at that, Black political power emerged in the South. It did not last long as deeper resentment among whites allowed terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan to stop or blockade Black rights.