Immediately after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress passed Amendments to the Constitution.

• The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and indentured servitude.

• The 14th Amendment granted African Americans full citizenship and equal rights under the law.

• The 15th Amendment provided voting protection rights regardless of race, color, or previous status as an enslaved man.

Initial Reconstruction efforts greatly benefitted Black communities.

Early Reconstruction efforts empowered blacks to own land, build communities, form churches, vote for government officials, and send their children to school (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 22).

As historian Eric Foner (2014) noted, “blacks were active agents in the making of Reconstruction” (p. xxii). He goes further to say that the extent to which free Blacks engaged in rebuilding their communities “was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experience in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century” (p. xxiii). Unfortunately, that radical experience did not last.