For some African Americans, the end of slavery came with the January 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the document that proclaimed most of them free. For others, it came in April 1865 with the end of the Civil War (1861–65). This bloody, four-year conflict had divided the nation, pitting the Northern Union (federal government) against the Confederacy, the eleven Southern states that had seceded (broken away) from the United States. In any case, all of the four million former slaves rejoiced in their freedom.

The end of slavery did not, however, bring with it an easy solution to the problems facing black people. As noted in The Era of Reconstruction: 1865–1877, according to respected African American leader Frederick Douglass (c. 1817–1895), a former slave who fought first for the abolition of slavery and later for black civil rights, the freed...