a.The life of African Americans in the South radically changed after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. For starters there was now emancipation which meant that there was no more slavery. But the southern states later found ways to get around this. Even with new laws and new amendments the Southerner still found ways to diminish African-Americans. Socially, there were things like the Jim Crow laws that segregated African Americans and whites completely to the point where they could not even drink water in the same place. Legally African-Americans could now vote but the southern states imposed many things like taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses which basically were ways for African Americans not to vote. Apart from this African Americans could now also work but because many did not have the resources to start working on their own they started to join the sharecropping system which basically made them slaves in a legal way.
b. Even though African Americans had legally many more rights, they still got treated in the same way as before the Civil War since many of the southern states found ways to go around the new amendments and laws. One of the biggest examples is the sharecropping system. In this system the landlords' had power over the sale of the sharecroppers portion, put high interest loans and inflated pricing supplies. They also made new laws that restricted sharecroppers from having freedom of the farms which basically was slavery in a legal way.
