Reasons For The Failure Of Reconstruction

Reconstruction was a period from 1865 to 1877 in which national laws, including the United States’ Constitution, were rewritten to guarantee rights to former slaves. This era, however, failed to reach its goal of allowing freed slaves to gain economic and social mobility. White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan created a dangerous environment for African Americans to thrive in. For instance, Harper’s Weekly magazine wrote, “If a colored man ventures to tell of some frightful assassination…he is himself dragged from prison where he had been placed for safety and slaughtered[.]” Many black people lived in fear because of the Ku Klux Klan’s power, regardless of the fact they were in a time in which they were supposed to be regarded as people. Moreover, southern newspapers did not denounce murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan. The
After studying the lineage of twenty economically successful African Americans, Henry Louis Gates Jr. noticed that seventy-five percent of them descend from former slaves who obtained property by 1920, a time when only a quarter of black families owned property because an insufficient amount of governmental policies were enforced in the Reconstruction era. Accruing land during Reconstruction provided former slaves more economic opportunities since crops and raw materials could be grown to be sold. More economic stability would have allowed children of these former slaves to access to better education and other tools for economic success. Nevertheless, obtaining land was not a reality for most African Americans because the government failed to assist them. Thus, gaining access to economic opportunities that came with owning property was difficult. Consequently, descendants of former slaves had less potential to advance economically due to the compromising financial situation previous generations were