Black Men Occupations
After slavery was abolished, the newly freed blacks had to find jobs to support their families and find their place in society. It wasn’t easy to find work for black men because people still believed that blacks were not equal to whites. As we saw in Toni Morrison’s book Beloved, a common job for an ex-slave like Paul-D, was to do physically taxing jobs like working on the rivers. Another job available to blacks was to work at a Post Office. In this job, they would sort through mail and would deliver it to where it needed to go (Rubio, p 2). Blacks were a big part of the recovery of the economy after the Civil War. Because they were freed, they could contribute to the supply and demand in the United States. This extra money flow helped the economy improve (Bois, Black Reconstruction in America). Lastly, a rare occupation documented by the author J. Clay Smith Jr. in the book “Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer”, is about black men trying to get jobs in the legal system. This was a very difficult job to get because it required years of education and very few African Americans were able to go to school due to the discrimination at that time.