Reconstruction Video

 

Before the documentary started, we were informed by Professor Smith that “Henry Louis Gates is one of today’s most important public intellectuals.” Throughout the video me, as well as my fellow classmates, were allowed the opportunity to hold a lens looking into the direction of truth and climate of the world during reconstruction. 

For starters, the reconstruction was the period of time almost immediately after the civil war ended. This was a time when blacks sat on the house of representatives. Poor whites and blacks felt connected through common struggle. Black hoped for a new system to be put in place where race wasn’t a barrier of entry for as many opportunities as it was during the time.

Leagues of blacks also just came back from fighting in a war in which they were fighting for a country who didn’t even see feasible giving them the rights which they were quite literally shedding blood for. Robert E. Lee and his followers also saw their defeat in the war as simply, “a loss due to a lack of manpower”. In this strain of thought, they thought that they had committed no wrongs in the eyes of the Lord and that everything should go back to the way it was before the war. So yes, a very multipronged approach to go about healing the nation from various minds during this time.

After we learned of the paradigms of the time, we learned of mothers who were in search of their children after their enslavement ended. I made a connection with a woman we talked about in our other class in the learning community in which we learned of the life of Harriet Jacobs. The connection that I almost immediately drew between Jacobs and the women of the documentary was the search as well as longing for familial connection post slavery. It had occurred to me when hearing stories that these were people who were separated from their families and who had possibly even accepted the fact that they may never even see them again.

I learned that true freedom in this time was measured by land, and how much of it you owned. This is where the Freedman’s Bureau comes into play. The Bureau was put in place to make sure that blacks had a fair opportunity post slavery. A lot of the capital that was given to the program came from land which was acquired from seizures during the war. The term “40 acres and a mule” comes from the Freedman’s Bureau. This was to make right for slavery and the disenfranchisement of blacks from any kind of economic opportunity. So, like many programs aimed to help those in need in this country with not much give back, if any, to the rich and powerful, it failed. The bureau was told by President Johnson to immediately put an end to its reign of rightdoing. So, many of the freed blacks simply refused to leave the land that was given to them as reparations. 

One quote that I heard in the documentary that really stuck with me was, “One can’t expect that racism just be discontinued due to the ending of slavery”. I think this is true, and to piggyback off of it, I’d take it even further and say that if anything it would just exacerbate the issue because now both sides of the spectrum have no structure to practice the racism within.
The confederacy, in many ways, got stronger AFTER the civil war. This is, in so many words, because people romanticized that “way of life”. 

I learned of the “Black Codes”. These were introduced as a way of making sure there was as little change from times of slavery to the era they were in. Blacks were arrested if they didn’t have a job. Some of these blacks were then forced into labor contracts which is quite literally just a legal version of slavery. White people would claim black children because, according to some of the white people, black parents weren’t suitable to take care of their children.

These whites would raise the children with their sole purpose being servants under them. Again, legal slavery. Nothing was really too much better on the legislative side of things either. Once congress reconvened, they allowed for confederate lawmakers to be a part of congress once again, big surprise there. Due to what was seen as a complete abandonment of legal support for blacks, whites began roaming the streets looking for blacks to kidnap, beat, or kill. Blacks were seen at this time as “beyond the law”.