By Enobong Hannah Branch America, through our monuments and celebrations, has had a way, historically and still at present, of hiding the contradictions of our democracy. In the late 1800s, at the same time that the Statue of Liberty declared America as a beacon of hope and freedom to the world, the South rejected Reconstruction and progress for the formerly enslaved. Through means both violent and nonviolent, slavery was reestablished by another name. State and local statutes, known as Jim Crow laws, legalized racial segregation.Sharecropping, a system of debt peonage, tied freedmen again to …