As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the "slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery."
History is made by human actors and the choices they make.
According to Douglas Blackmon, author of "Slavery by Another Name," the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition, and the rest of the country's accommodation, "explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded."
Designed to reverse black advances, Redemption was an organized effort by white merchants, planters, businessmen and politicians that followed Reconstruction. "Redeemers" employed vicious racial violence and state legislation as tools to prevent black citizenship and equality promised under the 14th and 15th amendments.
By the early 1900s, nearly every southern state had barred black citizens not only from voting but also from serving in public office, on juries and in the administration of the justice system.
The South's new racial caste system was not merely political and social. It was thoroughly economic. Slavery had made the South's agriculture-based economy the most powerful force in the global cotton market, but the Civil War devastated this economy.
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