Race Relations Events

We presented our EOTO projects today in class that were events that help and hindered race relations during and after the reconstructions era.

My group had events that helped race relations which consisted of the Civil Rights Act of 1865 which affirmed that all citizens had equal protect under laws. Along with the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which made it against the law to discriminate when it comes to public accommodations but later was deemed unconstitutional. Then there was the thirteenth amendment which abolished slavery in the United States and was the first of three Reconstruction Amendments adopted in the five years following the American Civil War. The fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and last but not least was the fifteenth Amendment which grants the African-American men the right to vote.

Some of the events that hurt race relations included the end of the Reconstruction Era which caused the blacks to have a lack of protection by the troops and the rise of Jim Crow Laws. The there was the creation of the Ku Klux Klan which was group that caused violence against republican leaders, voters, and blacks. There was also a rise in lynching which was a public display of murder, mostly hangings and burnings, of mainly blacks but whites were effected as well. The Wilmington Insurrection also known as the Wilmington massacre was a deadly act of violence of a group of whites. The last event mentioned was the Civil Rights Cases which consisted of five cases that the Supreme Court settled under a single ruling that the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional and legalized the notion of separate but equal.

It is hard to swallow the fact that this was part of our nation's history but learning the events and understanding why they happened is how we move forward as a country. I believe that more people need to know what happened before our time in order to not make the same wrong decisions and realize that the government does make mistakes because they are human. Our history is a big part of who we are and knowing why things the way they are today.