The Failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War

AP US History 2 The Failure of Reconstruction The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments liberated, naturalized, and franchised slaves. Although adequate in theory, they did not immediately establish social and economic equality of opportunity between freedmen and whites. On the contrary, former slaves were deliberately suppressed, both economically and socially, by supremacist whites that felt black men could never be equal to their former masters. In this aspect, Reconstruction was a failure due to: the leniency …

…social and economic equality. When the severely limited enforcement of such laws was removed in 1877, whites recreated the legislatures that were prominent before the Civil War. These local governments then shattered the very idea of racial equality - the resentment that whites held for black equality was so prevalent that Reconstruction, which was already lax, did little to remove or change it. The end of reconstruction makes you wonder - what was it all for?