In some cases, Apprentices, or those who were not going to be paid for their labor, were subject to such injustice in order to avoid violating Vagrancy laws which called for forced labor upon those who did not hold an occupation. The forced necessity of having a job or apprenticeship thus made African Americans accept no or incredibly low wages in order to avoid violating the Black Codes, which essentially then was a mere step up from slavery, and still left these former slaves wholly dependent on landowners. Most African Americans, who did not have the resources to purchase their own land and no longer owned land granted by Sherman’s Order, worked on the plantations owners by their former owners through sharecropping, and often times finding themselves indebted to such owners for equipment and supplies used to to grow crops on their land. Although compensated labor, and minimally so, former slaves were often so indebted to their former …show more content…
Groups which supported white supremacy, like the Ku Klux Klan and the Redshirts often terrorized African Americans in order to suppress the rise in power which African Americans found themselves gaining. In The Trouble They Seen: The Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African Americans, Dorothy Sterling shares that “between 1868 and 1871 [Ku Klux] Klansmen killed twenty thousand men, women, and children,” which highlights the true lack of power which African Americans held in the South. Losing Union troop protection in 1877, African Americans essentially lost their mobility and the right to suffrage simply due to