Dear Students: For this first discussion in the course I would like you to read chapter 15 of the course textbook, particularly the section, “The Meaning of Black Freedom,” in that chapter. Please also listen to the excerpt of an interview that Professor Blair Kelley gave this past Monday, Juneteenth. The interview is accessible in the next link in this unit, entitled “Professor Blair Kelley Discusses Sharecropping, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and African American Rights in the Post-Civil War South.” You can access this link by clicking on “Next” in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, or take a shortcut to it by clicking on the link title in the previous sentence. After listening to her interview please also review the materials in the next link, “A Closer Look: The Barrow Plantation in 1860 and 1881,” accessible by clicking twice on “Next” or by clicking on the link title a few words back in this sentence. Once you’ve read “The Meaning of Freedom” and listened to and viewed the material in “Professor Blair Kelley Discusses Sharecropping, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and African American Rights in the Post Civil-War South” and “A Closer Look: The Barrow Plantation in 1860 and 1881,” please go on to answer the following question with an answer at least two paragraphs long:
How much had life changed for former enslaved people in the South in the decades right after the Civil War ended in 1865, the same year the United States outlawed slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment? Had it changed a lot or not much? Why did you answer the way you did?
