Primary Source Lab Reflection
I read about North Carolina during the Reconstruction. The reconstruction was a period after the Civil War that was dedicated to rebuilding the U.S. and its government. I read researched one particular matter in reconstruction, the African American's. To find some primary sources of this I looked on The Library of Congress's, Chronicling America. While "time traveling" in the nineteenth century I found how normal it was to be racist without worrying about hurting a colored person. Everything was said on the newspapers with nothing to hide. People wrote and said anything they wanted for anyone to read regardless of what was right. Something that was very surprising to me is that they actually wrote about a white supremacy club from Morgantown, North Carolina in the news. It wrote that it was proud of the club being the first of its kind, and even had a colonel make a speech for its opening. Over one hundred and fifty people signed its membership. It was surprising because I could never imagine anyone writing positively about a racist group, and still could not see anyone taking pride in it even back then. The second newspaper I read was very much what I expected, however. For the new people of Congress in North Carolina, if they were black they had a "(negro)" put next to their name. This is so everyone would know they were not white but black, so that citizens would not forget the blacks "place" in society. The archive is much more useful than reading from a textbook because it shows specific, primary resources about what you want to find. It almost transports you to reading that at a dinner table in the 1870's.
Reconstruction came to an end because the white southern men grew violent from the many changes of the radical section of the reconstruction. There grew to be organizations, such as the ku klux klan, who attacked anyone of high ranking who did not agree in white supremacy, as well as killing many african-americans. There grew to be more white supremacy from the people of the South, and soon after the downfall of the American economy, the democrats took control over the House of Representatives. Rutherford Hayes declared democratic control of South for presidency. It ended fully with the Compromise of 1876.
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