Freedom. That's all African-Americans wanted. The freedom to be alongside a white person as an equal, the freedom to live where ever they wanted to, the freedom to have the same jobs as a white person. But why is it equality among people is such a difficult thing to accomplish? It took a hundred years after the abolition of slavery for African-Americans to gain equality. This picture displayed is a freedom march and the people in the picture all have signs demanding they receive that now. During reconstruction and the civil rights movement these people were treated very harshly. The civil rights movement was so much like reconstruction that it is also refered to as the secon Reconstuction era. In both times African-Americans would constantly get beat up by police enforcement and by other people of the public. During the reconstruction the Ku Klux Klan came into power, and this was a problem during the civil rights movement also but by the time of the civil rights movement they were not a prominent as they were before. But just how the white society had radicals ready to fight so did the African-Americans. They had a group known as the Black Panthers that focused on usong harsher tactics than the ones showed in the picture to get their point of equality over. During Reconsrtuction, Black Codes were placed so that the freed slaves were put into a similar state of slavery. They had no voting rights, were considered second-class citizens, not considered U.S citizens so they could not serve in a jury, and could not be walking about without employment. So often they would be forced into sharecropping. They would be doing the same things they were doing before and the pay was so little they were still dependent on the person they worked for. So it was as if all that fighting that just occured happened for absolutely nothing at all. During the civil rights movement they wanted all of this to change. They wanted rights and they wanted to end discrimination. Because they were at a better place than they were before they were able to get what they wanted successfully. They would boycott, have sit-ins, have freedom marches. The nonviolence way is how they went about fighting for what they wanted. Which goes to show that violence is not necessary if you want to achieve something.
The only thing that really differed from these two times is how they were handled. During Reconstruction the African-Americans did not really fight for more then they were offered. Slavery had ended and at the time that was enough. This was probably due to the fact that the Ku Klux Klan was out killing them if they even thought of being equal, which scared them so much they just kept things the way they were. During the civil rights movement it was all about fighting back. They have had enough and they were gonna change how things were run, one way or another. During this time majorly known leaders came and shook things up. For example like Martin Luther King Jr and Jesse Jackson. And even at this time not getting out of your seat for a white person like Rosa Parks did was a major deal.
In conclusion, even though these two events occured a hundred years after the other, they were so similar in what they were fighting for. It took a lot of time for the government to finally put an end to these discrimination. Even though this is all said and done, there is still racism in society. There will forever be ethnicities fighting and hating against each other, even after everything we as a society have gone through to try to change that.http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/91.4/images/hall_fig01b.jpg
