Free at last, free at last I thank God that I am finally free. “Because we colored people didn't know how to be free and the white people don't know how to have a free colored people with them,” written by Houston Hartsfield Holloway. In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation freed 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 how African Americans felt. They still had to deal with many hostile whites. The South did not welcome this new reconstruction. Whites did not want to live with blacks in a non-slave society. The South felt that Reconstruction was humiliating and vindictive. 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 best known of these initiatives was the Ku Klux Klan, a secret society of white supremacists formed in Tennessee. Members wore white hoods to hide their identities. They were grown men who didn't have the courage to show their f...