How did the South after Reconstruction compare to the South before the Civil War?

After, the
South was still trying to recover from the Civil War.  The infrastructure in the region was
still in shambles, especially in the Lower South, along the route William Sherman took on his
March to the Sea.  Politically, poor and middle class whites had more power than they did before
the war, though poor whites were still sharecroppers in many instances.  The region's economy
was starting to diversify, with Alabama starting to produce more iron and textile mills coming
to North Carolina, in order to take advantage of the surplus of labor in the South.  The South
remained a rural region and sharecropping would be a way of life and generational poverty until
WWII.  Reconstruction brought the end of slavery, but many places passed their own "black
codes" which made it a crime for blacks to travel with passes or to loiter.  Many blacks
were arrested and put on chain gangs in the post-Reconstruction South.  Even though slavery was
not an institution like it was...