Black Oppresion Continues After War Ends

Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front, by James Marten tells the history of the American Civil War from the Civilian viewpoint. Although published in 2003, this book is a collection of primary sources and first-hand quotes regarding life around the Civil War. It offers snippets of primary sources that tell what the people of the time were experiencing, but also gives insight from modern times to help better the readers’ understanding of the primary source. 

Booker T. Washington is quoted in discussing that he did not know he was a child of slavery until emancipation was on the horizon. Washington is famous for living through all of the difficulties freed slaves faced following their emancipation, including oppression by whites who thought they did not deserve rights and not having a set place as free people in society, and going on to create a successful education institution for blacks at Tuskegee, encouraging them to better themselves and therefore making an attempt to better white society’s opinion of them. 

The Freedman’s Bureau is referenced in discussion of freed people trying to reconnect with family members and loved ones they had been separated from through selling of slaves and events of the Civil War. When people began to reconnect there was a large increase in legal marriages among blacks, because this had not been previously legal, and therefore a surge in the black population. White Southerners were not pleased with this increase in black rights that was another motion toward equality among black and white citizens. Black Codes, along with white supremacist groups like the Klu Klux Klan went to great measures to reassert white power over former slaves.