Post- bellum communities are a communities that are distinct by the occupation and land tenore. The class status range from landowners at the top, to renters, sharecroppers, and finally agricultural laborers. Since African Americans as a group were kept on the bottom rung of the whole social structure, historians have tended to overlook distinctions among them. The people there would view them as tended to view them as an undifferentiated mass of agricultural workers or, at best, as tenant farmers. In Edgefield District following the Civil War, most African Americans could find work only as wage laborers. Early in the postwar period, white community leaders tried to prevent white landowners from renting land to African Americans so that black laborers were forced to work either for wages or for a share of the crop.
The antebellum free slave communities is a period after the civil war. They now have the ability to express themselves, however, was determined by whether they lived in the North or the South. Free Southern blacks continued to live under the shadow of slavery, unable to travel or assemble as freely as those in the North. It was also more difficult for them to organize and sustain churches, schools, or fraternal orders. Although their lives were circumscribed by numerous discriminatory laws even in the colonial period, freed African Americans, especially in the North, were active participants in American society. Black men enlisted as soldiers and fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Some owned land, homes, businesses, and paid taxes. In some Northern cities, for brief periods of time, black property owners voted. A very small number of free blacks owned slaves. But those slaves were their relatives, later manumitted. A few free blacks also owned slave holding plantations in Louisiana, Virginia, and South Carolina. The free african americans in the north had pretty easy lives but the in the South their old owners had "some" power over them.
So the difference is during antebellum period, the free African American had rights. They were free of owning lands, voting, having slaves. They were all living normal lives like the white people. But it also depends if they are in the South or North. And the post bellum communities are when the African American and the whites were distinct by their occupation and land tenore. The African American had the rights to rent lands from the whites. But the Africans Americans lives were partly controlled because the white leaders would prevent white to let African American to rent their lands forcing the African American to work as wages laborers or have a share crop. Too sum up, during the antebellum period the African American had more rights and freedom than the post bellum communities.