From the nineteenth century to the present, the United States has been hailed as a "land of opportunity" where individuals could achieve personal, political, religious, and economic freedoms. The image of the "land of opportunity" was true to different degrees for the African-American sharecropper in the postwar South, the immigrant at Ellis Island, and the wealthy capitalist or manager in the period from eighteen-sixty five to nineteen-fourteen with the African-American being at the low end of the rung and the capitalist being at the top.
The newly freed African-American in the postwar South had the hardest time achieving freedoms due to white men considering them as inferior. As on southerner of the time said, the "ex-slave was not a free man; he was a free Negro" . This is best exemplified in the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws of the time. If we look at the African-American of the time and compare them to the rest of the citizens of United States then they were seriously lacking......
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