The Fight for FreedomEssay Preview: The Fight for FreedomReport this essayThe Fight for FreedomAbolitionists and supporters of womens suffrage united in a common struggle for equal rights before the Civil War. However, after black men won the right to vote, a split developed between civil rights leaders and supporters of womens rights. This historical split changed the meaning of freedom among those who were affected by the constant changes.
Freedom was viewed as a loss for the white man, because for the first time he would have to cook his own food, till his own ground and handle other types of physical labor. It was difficult for them to fathom that slaves could ever have the same rights as they did, and they felt that freedom was a birthright in which former slaves could never have. Many whites believed that blacks were not capable of running their own lives and they pitied them. Therefore, whites saw this so called freedom as a defeated effort, while the former slave saw it as a victorious, yet confusing change.
The slave saw freedom as a big question mark, asking how, what, when and where. Many slaves had been restricted all their lives and they had never experienced making their own choices. They were told what to do, how to do it, when to do it and where to do it. Freedom was celebrated by some, while others, less trusting, approached their new status with caution. Despite the uncertainties blacks began to demonstrate their freedom by acquiring everything that previously was not allowed. Some slaves realized that there was more to being free than just leaving the plantations. Many experienced the confusion because of the various adjustments that were being made. Equality was the central focus not only for blacks, but for women. Women felt betrayed because they were excluded from the Fifteenth Amendment that gave black men the right to vote. They deemed it necessary to defy gender laws and along with the blacks the Womens Suffrage Movement fought to achieve political and civil rights.
The Reconstruction Era began the fight to accommodate newly emancipated blacks. This adjustment to change the social order began under the leadership of President Lincoln. The Reconstruction Era lasted from 1866 to 1877 and its objective was to reorganize the southern states to define the means by which whites and blacks could live together in a culture without slavery. Former slaves tried to establish livelihoods for themselves by finding their own employment and by acquiring the land of their ex-slave owners while being protected by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitutions. The Reconstruction Era was a major milestone for blacks. However, the Reconstruction era was short lived, because shortly thereafter President Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson became president. President Johnson made little effort to continue what Lincoln had started and he did nothing to stop the government in the south from passing laws to restrict opportunities for blacks. It was said in a Kentucky newspaper that” the former slave was free, but free only to labor”.
The blacks were indeed free only to labor and it was demonstrated in a scandalous opposition in the South called, “The Black Codes”. The Black Codes were a series of laws that were passed by the former Confederate states to prevent blacks from gaining civic power. The South understood freedom a little differently than the North, therefore Southerners refused to allow former slaves to have the same independence as they did. Southerners continued their belief of mastery over the slaves and considered freedom for the slaves as a privilege and not a right. These laws were limited to what the blacks could or could not do such as; no meetings after sunset, every Negro had to be employed
Many of the blacks who were executed in the U.S. and others executed in Britain were enslaved in America at the time. This is to say that most of the blacks who were executed were freed and the blacks that escaped were not. One such escape was with a group that escaped from the slave trade. These slaves are called members of the black community. A black family who escaped with their slaves during the slave trade is still called a member of the black community. The term black community, formerly applied to slaves, can also be applied to the whites who escaped from slavery, especially the slaves who escaped from the black community. This group includes whites who were slaves after the slave trade was started. They include many African-Americans who escaped with the slaves with a combination of financial or criminal infractions. This is one of those groupings you can read about in a book that was originally published in 1882. It called for a re-establishing of the slave trading. At the start of the war black slavery, which was the worst crime in the nation, was a bad idea. You can read about how black slaves were treated under the first slave trading laws and that in a letter from a lawyer to a slave slave at South Carolina, he said: “You Negro slave are not guilty of any charges, either. If your rights had been enjoyed to the same degree as ours, a better cause would be the following.” The slave trade was a big deal and the slave trader who was responsible paid for those things. The slaves were not going to lose money and if they were, it would be a fair and just settlement. If we didn’t have the money to pay for slave labor and slaves didn’t have the right to work with us, where would we be if we had not been punished for us being slaves? But the slave trade was an idea that wasn’t popular enough and with it was a huge amount of money and slaves had to be put to labor and they were doing it in slave labor. Slaves were a group of people whose rights were still in demand and they didn’t have many and people thought that slavery was illegal because they weren’t working for the government. Slaves were not just people who didn’t have a right and they didn’t want to be slaves. They were a group of people who were paid to work as their families didn’t want to be slaves.
At that time we had the greatest economic power in the country, the greatest wealth and the most powerful and our slaves were the slaves of the greatest and only of these groups.” The same passage was made by the founder of the NAACP, Dr. John Adams, whose position on slavery was stated as : “It is not lawful for any person or thing to use slaves to