History Minute (071): Ulysses S. Grant's election and Black people manifest their independence

In History Minute (070) we learned that Congress passed Constitutional amendments and laws to provide civil rights for Blacks freed from slavery, but Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, thwarted implementation. He was impeached, but the Senate did not vote to convict him. 

Nevertheless, there was a Presidential election that same year, 1868, and Republican Ulysses S. Grant won by 300,000 votes, with 700,000 Blacks having voted. So Johnson was no longer an obstacle, and the will of Congress, on behalf of the people, was now being enforced: Southern states could only come back into the Union if they supported the new Constitutional amendments providing civil rights.

With their newfound freedom and rights, despite lack of land and resources, Southern Blacks made great strides. For example, in the first few years after the war, Blacks in the South began to immediately assert their independence from Whites. They formed their own churches, put forth their own politicians, got elected to state legislatures, endeavored to reunite families and keep them together, and set out to provide for the education of their children, even starting their own schools. Historian Peter Kolchin commented, "As soon as they were free, these supposedly dependent, childlike Negroes began acting like independent men and women."

Read more! 

A People's History of the United States 

Howard Zinn 

Get your copy — Support your local bookstores by shopping Bookshop.org — https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-people-s-history-of-the-united-states-1492-to-present-revised-and-updated-edition-howard-zinn/7e243f9bc6464a2e?ean=9780062397348&next=t 

 — or — 

find it at Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states/id1046889377