Freedom To Former Slaves During The Reconstruction Era

Reconstruction was more than just putting the country back together. It was a period of chaos and freedom. The civil war had just ended and slaves were finally “free”. Slaves did not know what it meant to be free since they had always been someone’s property and never really were able to live their own lives. The rise of actual freedom to former slaves came after the Reconstruction of 1867. Former slaves now had the power to be involved in politics, however, they were rising in power that led to opposing views of he whites. During the Reconstruction era, African American’s oppression to restricted political freedom challenged the norms of white society which led to violence to maintain white supremacy. During this period of time, former slave owners “…seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them” (Andrews). How can former slaves that never had a voice now be the ones making all the decisions?
Elias Hill claims that, “then they hit me with their fists…struck me again with their fists…they said I had no honor, and hit me again”. The KKK believed that in order to deal with them was to terrorize them. This seemed like the right thing to do for the whites because the blacks were basically surpassing them in power. They went on assaulting blacks, raiding and destroying homes, schools, and churches to prove who actually had authority. This notion that whites are superior to the blacks was seen through all the violence and criminal acts performed on them. Whites not only did this to put a halt to the uprising power of the blacks but to maintain their power. They believed their race was superior to everybody else; “Don’t you pray against Ku-Klux, but pray that God may forgive Ku-Klux”. This shows that this organization believed it was doing the right thing by killing the blacks and eliminating