How did white Southerners attempt to limit the freedom of their former slaves? I am writing an essay on why the Southerners' attempts to control...

As the
previous educator mentioned, former slave owners tried to continue to force labor out of black
people. There were two ways in which this was accomplished in the late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth centuries: convict-leasing and sharecropping. The sharecropping system was one
in which there may have been a contract to work. Unlike indentured servitude, in which one
promised to work for a certain number of years in exchange for money or property, sharecroppers
could live on a planter's property for life. They labored in exchange for a share of the harvest
and a share of the earnings. It was not unusual for planters to cheat those who worked for
him.

Another way in which whites limited the freedom of blacks was through
disenfranchisement or, in other words, finding ways to prevent black people from voting. During
Reconstruction, numerous black men from Southern states became representatives and senators.
This new political power presented a profound threat to white supremacy in the South.
Disenfranchisement prevented the development of black political power in the South, which has
only recently changed with the elections of black, conservative politicians, such as former
Representative J.C. Watts of Oklahoma and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Poll taxes and, later, citizenship tests became methods of preventing black men from
exercising the right to votea right guaranteed in the Fifteenth Amendment. When this did not
work, racists resorted to terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan was formed during the Reconstruction years
and was resurrected in the 1920s. The KKK kidnapped and hung blacks who disrupted white power.
They also torched people's homes in the middle of the night. Cross-burnings in front of one's
home served as a warning.

I would argue that many of these methods were,
unfortunately, successful. When one measures the quality of life and household income of black
families versus those of white families in the South, the differences are stark. This is due to
decades of political and economic oppression, which included the destruction of viable black
communities (e.g., Greenwood in Tulsa and Rosewood, Florida).