ABSTRACT
The Emancipation Proclamation marked the end of slavery in the United States, but also signaled the beginning of a long period of social debate about how to heal the wounds left by the Civil War. The debate is not over: there are still legal arguments being made about possible governmental reparations to the descendants of slaves, and the facts of racism and hate crimes still produce daily headlines, to say nothing of the more subtle forms of discrimination that persist. There is a developing body of neo-slave narratives (also called new narratives of slavery) in the twenty-first century, and rhetoric about exploitation is often couched in antebellum terms, such as when the singer Prince, protesting his contract with Warner Brothers Records, tattooed the word “slave” on his face, or when the filmmaker Spike Lee, during the making of his film Malcolm X, referred to Warner Brothers Studio as a “plantation.” The wounds of slavery have healed slowly, if at all. And yet there was a rush in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to move
quickly past the pain and to address the problems of inequality. The social/political project known as Reconstruction (originally Radical Reconstruction) was a deliberate attempt to enfranchise blacks, especially in the realm of government. Reconstruction lasted just over a decade (1865-1877), and at its end American society was in disarray with regard to race relations. Although the project initially succeeded in placing a number of southern blacks in political offices, it looks like a failure from our current historical vantage point, partly because it caused a backlash that included a horrifying number of lynchings, as hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan arose. Also, the appointment of blacks to political positions was undercut by southern states passing nefarious laws that restricted many blacks’ right to vote, including poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests. The postReconstruction period from 1877 through to roughly 1900 was a despairing, dark period in African American history.
