s well. Most blacks who desired a college education had to go to the north. Hideous crimes committed by both Southern and Northern whites against blacks mostly went unpunished. "In one Democratic Alabama county in 1870, a black woman was brutally beaten by a group of whites was ordered to raise $16.45 for court costs before her complaint was heard. After she did so, the judge released the offenders and instructed the injured woman to drop the matter or face a jail term" (p.182). At the first inclination of black progress, violence raised its ugly head. The emergence of a hate groups and mobs policed elections and occasions where blacks as a race could challenged the racist institutions of the past. "The Ku Klux Klan emerges as a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy"(p.184). The K.K.K. wanted full control of the blacks as a labor force. The primary objective of the K.K.K. was to weaken Reconstruction and reinstate racial inferiority in every condition of Southern life. Murders and lynchings were a standard form of coercion to terrorize blacks back into submission. Many blacks lost their lives if a politician was sympathetic to the black cause or if the threat of widespread black vote for a certain candidate could determine the outcome of an election. Beatings, whippings, and raids on black homes continued throughout the South. Educated blacks and black leaders were persecuted and killed in order to persuade other blacks to refrain from objecting to longstanding policies. Blacks were tortured both mentally and physically in their struggle for freedom. Racism prevented Reconstruction's incorporation of the free black into white American society. The disenfranchisement of the black citizen pervaded America's culture and politics. Racism allowed the south to remain a one-party system ruled by a regressive privileged few who u...
