Free at last, free at last I thank God that I am finally free. “For we colored people did not know how to be free, and white people do not know how to have free colored people around them,” written by Houston Hartsfield Holloway. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation liberated African Americans in rebellious states. After the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated all American slaves. Freedom was what was established, but that was not what African Americans felt. They still had to deal with many hostile whites. The South did not welcome this new Reconstruction. White people did not want to live with black people in a non-slavery society. The South felt that Reconstruction was humiliating and vengeful. Despite the progress made by blacks in the South after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which freed slaves and allowed them to vote, racism still existed. The most famous of these initiatives was the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist secret society created in Tennessee. Members wore white hoods to conceal their identities. They were grown men who didn't have the courage to show their strength....