What should have been done about former slaves during the Reconstruction era?

The answer to this, of course, is somewhat a matter of opinion, but historians generally agree that a major problem confronting African-Americans in the South after the Civil War was their lack of land ownership, the precondition for economic opportunity in the agrarian South. Even the Radical Republicans did not, for the most part, advocate serious land reform by seizing land from southern planters and redistributing it. Freedmen were thus forced to enter into sharecropping and tenant farming arrangements with landowners, and these almost inevitably resulted in debt and poverty for African-Americans in the South. It could also be argued that the federal government should have continued to enforce voting and other civil rights for black men in the South rather than largely abandoning them as they did in the 1870s. In the absence of federal enforcement, blacks were disfranchised and more or less powerless to legally contest the passage of "Jim Crow" laws in the next two decades.