However to briefly respond to some of your thoughts, you seem to associate liberty with equality. They are in fact, and always have been, conflicting values. It is impossible to be both free and equal. If you are free, you can succeed or fail. If you are made equal, either you or others must be constrained--usually both you and others, as no one is really free in a Communist, egalitarian system.
The set back to the Southern Negro, to which I referred in Reconstruction, was not primarily because of the ravishes of the War. I was writing in relative terms. The Southern Negro lost ground relative to the poor Southern White during Reconstruction, because he was treated as a pawn by the contemptible alliance of scoundrels--Carpetbaggers, Scaliwags and radical politicians--who promised such nonsense as "Forty Acres & a Mule," i.e. equality and prosperity from Government. It was from this social mess, a loss of many of the skills that they had had in 1865, out of which Booker T. Washington was trying to lift his people. (Let me be a bit more specific without making this unreadable. In 1860 most of the skilled craft work in the deep South--the Gulf States--was being performed by Negro craftsmen. By 1890, the greatest participation in any of the skilled crafts was down to a mere 20%, while some were down to about 2%, and this in States where the Negro was either in a majority or in a very large minority.)
The Southern people have indeed been victimized, and the saddest of all the victims were those Negroes promised the moon, as it were, but led by the pied pipers of the Left to perdition. How much more appealing is the picture proposed by Booker T. Washington, of racial cooperation based upon the ancient ties of two distinct peoples, united in a common culture. (For more on Washington's vision, and how it paralleled that of the Founding Fathers, see The Persuasive Use Of Images.)
William Flax
Your statistic is interesting, but it doesn't establish a connection between Reconstruction and the decline of Black craftsmen. Without major efforts at fighting segregation and racial discrimination, emancipation would inevitably have meant that Whites would hire other Whites more often than they would hire Blacks. But still, it was an improvement over slavery.
In arguing that the problem of race couldn't have been easily resolved you are taking a line similar to that of Lincoln. That perception is one reason why he put Union above emancipation. Had Southern political leaders remained in the Union, they could have avoided the results that you deplore. The Union eventually allowed for a dispersion of the Black population and a decrease of racial tensions. But that wasn't what the secessionist militants wanted.