Race, Expansion & War

With the formal end of slavery a new phase of the American history began – the so called era of Reconstruction. This period led to radical changes for the black community. In this essay I will try to outline that Reconstruction in the end did neither ‘reconstructed’ nor ‘constructed’ a better life, respectively democracy and freedom, for black Americans in the South. In order to do so I will work with examples from the Caribbean Islands like Haiti and Jamaica, where slavery was abolished only some years before, to give a better understanding of the situation in the United States.