Condition of African-Americans in the late nineteenth...

Examine the condition of African-Americans in the late nineteenth century and explain why the Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which were enacted to aid the new freedmen, actually did little. In the late nineteenth century after the civil war the U.S. was over, there were about 4 million people that were once slaves that were now set free. The big question for President Lincoln and the presidents that followed was what to do with them? Even though the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed to free and aid the freed slaves it actually did very little to help them at all because many other events that took place, which prevented them from working. The white southern†¦show more content†¦During the sharecropping the Jim Crowe laws were passed, which it illegal for blacks to quite their sharecropping job until all their debts are paid. This kept black working in sharecropping as well as keeping them in debt. The Slaughter-House decision by the Supreme Court limited the power of the Fourteenth Amendment. It declared that the Jim Crowe laws were state laws and that they could not over turn them because the federal government did not have power over state laws. It also declared that national citizenship and state citizenship were different. In the U.S. v. Cruikshank the court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give the federal government power to act against the whites, who attacked a meeting of blacks and conspired deprive them of their rights, and they said that the duty of protecting equal rights for citizens was in the states hands. So the federal government could not do anything about one person violating another’s civil rights that lived in the same state. The Fifteenth Amendment gave black males over the age of 21 the right to vote. However, southern states set up poll taxes and literacy test in order to keep most blacks from voting. In order to keep the white votes they set up the grandfather clause, which allowed the seventy-five percent of the poor illiterate white people to still vote if they were the son or grandson of someone who was eligible to vote before 1867. During reconstruction a group formed in the south called the Ku KluxShow MoreRelatedA Rose For Emily Character Analysis1269 Words   |  6 Pages A Rose for Emily William Faulkner’s, A Rose for Emily, is an account from an eye witness’ perspective of the life and dilemma of a noble woman belonging to the bankrupt aristocratic family in the late nineteenth century. It’s a tale of a woman who due to her seclusion at the hands of her father and severe critique by the society turns into a mentally unstable person. The character of Emily is intriguing in its stubbornness of defying the changes around her. She is set in her ways and unwillingRead MoreAnalysis Of Booker T. Washington1630 Words   |  7 PagesBooker T. Washington and W.E.B. 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