Describe the economic fate of freed people during and immediately following Reconstruction

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER: Students should recognize that while freedom meant autonomy, it eventually would translate into poverty. Because the federal government failed to distribute land to the freed people, blacks compromised with landowners. Rather than being subjected to oversight in a wagelabor arrangement, which for many freed people bore a resemblance to slavery, freed people opted for sharecropping, which provided them with autonomy. Good students will connect this concept to the freed people's desire to come and go and to form black institutions (like churches) as indicative of this desire for self-control. Finally, students will point out that sharecropping relegated African Americans to a system that trapped them in a vicious cycle of debt and resulting poverty.