After the Civil War, when African-Americans began to experience freedom from enslavement for the first time in over 300 years, there was a brief period of jubilee. During this period of time, African-Americans began to be enfranchised and efforts were made by the Lincoln Era Republicans and northerners to educate and empower former slaves.
The North had sacrificed much in keeping the Union whole and Southerners had sacrificed much trying to keep their stranglehold on the lives and labor of black people and their myth of white supremacy. Lincoln was assassinated before he could fully cement his vision of reconstruction and re-union of this country. He was killed by a group of men who considered themselves super-patriots. John Wilkes Booth thought that people would laud his action and hold him to be a hero.
Over the next 10 years black people would watch their freedoms slowly slip away into nights of terror, and the advent of Jim Crow, which was "slavery by another name". Jim Crow officially ended when I was a teenager, but not without the upheaval and straining of our democracy to its breaking point.....at this point, I just want President Obama to live.
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