For more than four million African Americans living in the Southern United States, the end of the Civil War (1861–65) brought the freedom they had hoped for during all the long years of slavery. Ever since the arrival of the first white colonists in the New World, blacks captured in Africa and transported across the sea on slave ships had toiled without pay in fields and as house servants in the South. They had endured harsh conditions with remarkable strength and adaptability. Freedom brought great joy and expanded opportunities, but it also created new challenges. Probably the most threatening was the resentment of white Southerners, who found this changed society—and especially their new relationship with blacks—hard to accept.

A Changed Society

Northern journalists who traveled south in the days following the war's April 1865 conclusion found...