In order to fully understand the lives of African Americans after the abolishment of slavery, one first needs some background on the condition of the United States after slavery and the Civil War. After the Civil War areas in the South still remained very agriculturally based; therefore, many freedpeople continued to work for white plantation owners, but were granted more freedoms. Blacks were now able to decide which family members would work on …show more content…
Although some whites were forced to work under the same conditions as blacks others refused to even higher freed blacks. Many southern whites would not acknowledge black people as free, and insisted on acting as if nothing had changed. The majority of whites saw nothing wrong with the way they treated black people because they truly believed that blacks were solely alive to work as slaves. Although, owning another person and forcing them to work in unjust and unsafe manners was both morally and ethically wrong most whites insisted that it was the way things were meant to be. Having many whites with this mindset caused a lot of problems for black people after they were freed because whites still did not respect blacks and were not afraid to show their racism in implicit and explicit