African-Americans after Slavery
During the Civil War,
in 1863 AD, President Lincoln
announced the end of slavery. When the North won the war, in 1865, Congress and the states voted to
change the Constitution to make slavery illegal, so all the people who were slaves in the South became free.
Some people chose to leave the plantations, now that
they were free. Some of them moved to the North to work on the railroads
or as house-cleaners or nannies or cooks, or to start their own businesses. Some people went out West to be
settlers or cowboys. A few people went back to Africa.
A 13-year-old boy sharecropping (1937)
But most people just stayed about where they were before.
That was all they knew how to do, and they were afraid to start over in
a new place. Or maybe they had kids who couldn't walk far, or didn't want
to leave their old parents. A lot of people kept on planting and picking
cotton, but now they were sharecroppers
instead of slaves. For a lot of people, it didn't
make much difference, only there were not so many beatings and you didn't
have your kids or your husband taken away from you anymore. But white people
still terrified black people by killing them for nothing, or for almost
nothing, and no white judge or jury in the south would send any white man
to jail for killing a black man.
About fifty years later, though, in 1910, the cotton
was ruined by a kind of insect called a boll weevil. A lot of sharecroppers
were starving from not having enough cotton to sell for food. Besides, it
was getting cheaper to raise cotton
using machines instead of people. So a lot more people decided to leave
the South and go north to work. Because white people wouldn't hire them for any good jobs, they still worked mostly as servants or
in hard, dirty jobs like cleaning streets or building railroads.
