“The African-American's understanding of freedom was shaped by their experiences as slaves and their observations of the free society around them”(Forner 548). The African-Americans wanted to do whatever they saw the free white men doing which was own land, raise families go to work while the wife stayed at home, vote, and have a say in what church they would attend. The former slaves did create their own churches and families, Forner says on page 549, “One northern reporter in 1865 encountered a freedman who had walked more than 600 miles from Georgia to North Carolina, searching for the wife and children whom he had been sold away before the war.” This shows that the slaves wanted to have the family so bad that they would walk all across America. As for the churches the African-Americans abandoned the white-controlled religious institutions and made their own