The Reconstruction Era, a period in American history at the end of and immediately following the Civil War, is one of the single most important and instructive periods in American history. It has also, historically, been one of the least taught. Why is that, and what are we missing by not learning about it? Well, a lot.
In this, the first in a three-part series on Reconstruction, we speak to Mimi Eisen of the Zinn Education Project about America’s first Civil Rights Era and why most of us don’t know enough - or anything at all - about it.
Transcript
Rebecca Lavoie: [00:00:02] This episode of Civics 101 was made possible in part by a contribution in memory of Martin Leslie Schneider.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:11] I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:12] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:13] And we're just going to get straight to it. Nick I have wanted to talk about Reconstruction for a long time on this show. I just didn't entirely know how. It's a term that we use to talk about an era of American history, a period following America's civil [00:00:30] war, a period when formerly enslaved people were ostensibly freed from bondage and also ostensibly free to exercise their rights. It's a term we use to talk about constitutional amendments that are often pointed to as fundamentally changing human rights in America. It's also a period that we do not talk about.
Mimi Eisen: [00:01:03] Reconstruction [00:01:00] is one of the most consequential and instructive eras of US history and also among the most suppressed in K through 12 education and in public memory.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:14] This is Mimi Eisen.
Mimi Eisen: [00:01:15] I'm a historian and program manager for the Zinn Education Project and coauthor of our report on Teaching Reconstruction, Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:29] Okay, So if we're going to [00:01:30] talk about what we don't talk about and why I think the first step should be to establish in very broad terms what Reconstruction is.
Mimi Eisen: [00:01:39] It was this time during and after the Civil War with the emancipation of 4 million enslaved people in the South of immense possibility for wealth redistribution and progress towards multiracial democracy.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:54] Okay, Hannah, I have never heard Reconstruction described in hopeful terms or [00:02:00] using the word possibility.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:02] Yeah, and that's what we're trying to address here. The possibility or really we should call it the promise that came with the abolition of slavery were the rights and privileges of being an American citizen. Free Black citizens had been fighting for them long before the Civil War, and now there would be a nationwide struggle for the right to actual freedom, to movement, to employment, to [00:02:30] enfranchisement, to property ownership, to education, to safety, to in short life and liberty, all of which was met with violent resistance and white terrorism.
Mimi Eisen: [00:02:47] And this Reconstruction project was a grassroots, Black led movement to rebuild the country in ways that actually meet the needs of regular people and that prioritized equity [00:03:00] and justice on an unprecedented scale. This was a movement for fair labor and land ownership, education, political representation, joy and kinship, reconstituting communities after emancipation. And it was successful in some major ways. And it was also a movement that white supremacists responded to overwhelmingly with terror, violence and fraud and dismantled and all sorts of ways.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:39] This [00:03:30] episode is part of a series about Reconstruction. We're going to cover so much more about the truth of this era, the myths about it, the human stories, the reverberations. But first, I want to establish why one of the most significant eras of American history is also one of the least taught. I mean, Nick, what was your experience [00:04:00] of learning about reconstruction?
Nick Capodice: [00:04:02] Well, remember, I learned about it sort of at the end of the school year. We had just gotten to it and then we had to wrap up for tests. I remember words like carpetbaggers and scalawags. I remember that it was a period after the Civil War. It was a period that eventually and quickly ended. And also maybe that it was about trying to ease former Confederate states back into the Union. And I ultimately remember that it was a failure.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:28] I got pretty much the same [00:04:30] lesson in public school in the 1990s in Massachusetts, which, to be clear is not to say that this was a universal lesson across the country, but significantly, the lessons that I personally learned were centered on the actions of the federal government and not at all on the Black freedom struggle. But that was 30 years ago, right? So what's going on now? Mimi and a team at the Zinn Education Project spoke to teachers across the country about what is being taught in public [00:05:00] schools in the US today when it comes to Reconstruction. And many of these teachers she spoke to asked to remain anonymous.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:09] Why are you not supposed to answer surveys if you're a teacher or something?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:13] It's not that, actually. These teachers were answering these questions in 2021, when states across the country began introducing bills restricting what schools can teach when it comes to race, history, generally sexual orientation, politics, gender identity. These [00:05:30] teachers, in short, were scared.
Mimi Eisen: [00:05:33] An example that actually always stands out to me is in 2021, when one of the groups Moms for Liberty put a bounty on teachers heads in New Hampshire, if they teach the true history of this country, if they explain to students how we got here.
Speaker5: [00:05:48] Another big concern for Moms for Liberty critical race theory, a concept typically taught in law school that seeks to understand and address inequality and racism in the US. The Moms for Liberty [00:06:00] New Hampshire chapter offering a $500 bounty for anyone who turns in a teacher using CRT in the classroom. The governor of New Hampshire signed a law in June banning CRT in the.
Mimi Eisen: [00:06:12] And since 2020, 42 states have introduced bills or taken other measures to ban accurate histories from classrooms, and 18 have imposed these bans. And these tactics have had a chilling effect on history education. [00:06:30]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:30] This bounty, by the way, came in the form of a tweet offering money to anyone who caught a teacher teaching anything that violated a new state law, banning certain.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:40] Lessons, certain lessons like what.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:43] This law and many laws like it across the country banned schools from teaching that anybody is, quote, inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, consciously or unconsciously, based on their race, sex or other characteristics. Other states target [00:07:00] things like teaching the idea of unconscious bias based on race or that the US is fundamentally racist or sexist.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:08] Right. We've heard a lot from teachers about this right?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:10] And what we hear is that laws like this make teachers and administrators afraid. While they may want to teach accurate history to tell their students the truth, they are concerned about being perceived as literally breaking the laws of their state. And then on top of this, there are many parents and advocacy groups across the country, almost entirely [00:07:30] white, continuing a long tradition of anti equality resistance among white parents that don't want books like, you know, Ruby Bridges Goes to School or words like 'injustice' and 'inequality' to be part of lessons, period.
Archival: [00:07:45] Parents beware of terms like social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion. If they ignore their our input, we will vote them out.
Archival: [00:07:55] If you have materials that you're providing where it says if you were born a white male, you were born an oppressor, you [00:08:00] are abusing our children. The VI.
Archival: [00:08:01] Program is a Trojan horse that will bring in a slippery slope, a slippery slope that will ultimately end in critical race theory, white repentance and the Mcdonaldization of America.
Archival: [00:08:12] Students critical race theory isn't being taught here. But that didn't stop dozens of parents from flooding a recent school board meeting to protest it.
Archival: [00:08:20] I will do everything I possibly can to fight to the bitter end until you prove to me that you are not teaching my children that they are racist just because they're white.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:33] So [00:08:30] when Mimi says chilling effect, she means teachers pulling back some on teaching certain things to preserve their jobs just in case.
Mimi Eisen: [00:08:42] Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his people have banned African American studies and not AP, European or World history or the other AP offerings, just the African American Studies course, which they said lacks significant educational value. And [00:09:00] a lot of people are really pushing back on that. I was just reading a Washington Post article on Marvin Dunn, a professor in Florida, who takes students to significant. The state, places where Black communities made their homes in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Lynching sites, Cemeteries. To give students a real scope of this history and to ground it in place. And he was saying in this article that he'll continue to defy these laws and many others will, too, and have been resisting this [00:09:30] anti history movement.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:31] So there are the Marvin Dunns of the world who say, no way, I'm teaching it anyway. And by the way, I want to keep in mind throughout this what and who is actually being erased when history is taught this way. A Black civil rights struggle, typified by widespread mobilization. We can access this history. We can access the stories of powerful political figures and an organized community demanding to exercise their rights in a multiracial democracy. [00:10:00] There are thought, and political leaders like Frederick Douglass, a name that many will recognize, but even a focus on a few brilliant and standout figures belies something so much bigger.
Mimi Eisen: [00:10:12] They are part of a larger movement. They didn't do it all on their own. That's that's the truth. And so I think studying coalitions is really important. Like people in Alabama working in the Black press, people in Iowa calling to remove the word white [00:10:30] from the state's voting laws, or a colored convention in Delaware where people met to discuss and demand resources to educate their children. So I'll start with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who was a writer. She was a writer, a public speaker, a teacher, and someone who really recorded this history, recorded the stakes of the moment in her work. She moved south after the Civil War to teach and advocate for Black landownership. She [00:11:00] challenged some of the people we always hear about, like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and even Frederick Douglass, because they had competing visions of suffrage that didn't include Black women. And she really challenged that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:13] And by the way, if you're thinking, okay, but Frances Ellen Watkins, Harper isn't in my textbooks, maybe not, but her poems, short stories, essays and speeches are not hard to find.
Mimi Eisen: [00:11:29] I also want to [00:11:30] highlight Tunis Campbell, who did many things and lived in many places, too. But in the 1860s, he helped to establish schools on the Georgia Sea Islands. He then bought over a thousand acres and helped establish a community of Black landowners. He was on the Board of Registration in Georgia to help Black men vote. He was one of the first state senators and helped other Black men rise in politics, too. He served as justice of the peace, but [00:12:00] he bought those 1000 plus acres of land after Andrew Johnson pardoned Ex-confederates in the area and let them, like reclaim the Georgia Sea Islands. And while serving on the board of Registration, Campbell was poisoned and survived. And while serving in office, he was eventually expelled by the majority white legislature for being Black and later indicted and sent to work on a chain gang. And you can read about a lot of this in a pamphlet he wrote in 1877 [00:12:30] about his experiences. So again, we have like a primary source account from someone who most people don't know about, I would say, and who really exemplifies the achievements and the terror of that period in the freedom building movement and what he did with his community under the constant threat and reality of physical and political violence.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:59] There are [00:13:00] so many Black figures before, during and after Reconstruction who could be household names? Octavius Catto helped to desegregate streetcars and baseball in Philadelphia. Mary Ann Shad Cary, one of the first Black female lawyers in the US and a prominent lecturer and newspaper woman. Hiram Revels first Black American elected to the US Senate. Harriet Jacobs, who exposed the abuses of enslavement in the life of a slave girl. [00:13:30] And all of these leaders worked against structural racism. And if you live in a state where the law says subjects of inherent racism are forbidden, you are much less likely to hear from the powerful community members who fought against it.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:46] Because under these laws, subjects like slavery are really risky or subjects like Reconstruction.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:54] Or subjects like Reconstruction. So here is what teachers had to say to Mimi and her [00:14:00] team.
Mimi Eisen: [00:14:12] There were teachers who really explained kind of what they do pedagogically and how they really engage students in more active activities and lessons than what you would get from a textbook. And to really sort of step into these histories and, you know, imagine what they were like [00:14:30] and what choices people had to make. And there were teachers who said, you know, they have not been offered the professional development, that they need to know this history or they feel like they are rushed through it or they're afraid to teach it because of what's going on with the anti history movement or that they never learned it themselves. And so there was a whole mix of of responses and a whole mix of needs to respond to.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:59] We should [00:15:00] be very clear here, Nick, that just like Mimi said, there are teachers who are teaching this period as fully as they can and doing a really good job. But for many out there, the supports, the resources, the structure to teach Reconstruction fully and truthfully are not there and often push back.
Mimi Eisen: [00:15:23] Is it is an immensely difficult time for teachers in particular facing these sweeping attacks on [00:15:30] education and still navigating the pandemic.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:32] But Hannah, this part of the conversation is so specific to now, right? Yet neither you nor I got a sense of what Reconstruction really meant when we were at school decades ago. So not teaching the truth about Reconstruction has been going on for a long time, hasn't it?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:49] It sure has. Let's start with what is at the heart of not teaching certain American histories.
Mimi Eisen: [00:15:58] There's sort of a patchwork [00:16:00] of tactics to suppress truthful teaching. Mean standards to begin with, so often reflect the historical narratives endorsed by people in power and people specifically who want students to learn the master narrative of this country in a way that glosses over racism, classism, sexism, you know, people who don't want students to understand the causes of the inequities that exist through all sorts of institutions and areas of life, or to be inspired [00:16:30] by people through history who fought to address them, who envisioned something better, because then students might question and want to upend the status quo. And people, you know, who benefit from the status quo don't want that happening.
Nick Capodice: [00:16:45] That is truly a history is written by the victors narrative, isn't it?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:49] You know what? Especially with Reconstruction. I feel like the idea of a victor and not in a celebratory way, but in a someone got the upper hand over another way might [00:17:00] be useful for understanding what happened, because in the true story of reconstruction, there is a struggle, a fight for what Mimi described earlier, a multiracial democracy, and the people who got to tell the story after the fact are the ones who used force to make sure it didn't happen.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:20] So, Hannah, is this where this idea of Reconstruction as a failure comes from?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:25] In large part, But of course, as always, it's more complicated than that. And [00:17:30] we'll get into it all after the break.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:32] But before that break, just a reminder to our listeners that this show is listener supported. You're going to hear some ads from time to time. And yes, those do indeed help us out. But the most reliable and most rewarding support we get is from you. If you like what we do, consider making a donation in any amount at our website, civics101podcast.org.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:03] We're [00:18:00] back. You're listening to Civics 101. And just before the break, we were talking about this notion of Reconstruction as a failure, which is a myth. It's a total construct.
Nick Capodice: [00:18:14] And when you say a failure, you mean basically that it was this attempt to give Black citizens a civic and an economic role in the country, and that attempt didn't work.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:22] Yeah. And built into that narrative is this sense that it was never going to work, which puts the quote unquote failure [00:18:30] on the shoulders of those Black citizens and also, by the way, totally evades the truth, which is that black citizens were taking stepping into their rightful civic and economic roles, and those roles were being wrenched from their hands. Instead, this narrative presupposes a Black inferiority, an inability on the part of Black citizens to foster a multiracial democracy, to succeed in positions of political power, even to vote for the, quote right candidates [00:19:00] that white people could do it and Black people could not. And a lot of this story stems from what is called the Dunning School.
Mimi Eisen: [00:19:09] The Dunning School gets its name from William Dunning, who was a historian at Columbia University in the late 1800s, early 1900s. But the Dunning School of thought was much bigger than him or the university. It was the dominant approach to reconstruction scholarship for much of the 20th century, starting in the Jim Crow era and [00:19:30] pushing a lost cause narrative. You can see it in popular culture in a lot of ways, like Woodrow Wilson's favorite film, Birth of a Nation in 1915, which he played at the White House, an incredibly racist and popular film at the time that heaps praise onto the Ku Klux Klan and the lost cause of the Confederacy or Gone With the Wind in 1939, you know, glorifying the antebellum South Song of the South in 1946, which [00:20:00] features at Disney World's Splash Mountain, which Disney just closed and so on. Essentially, it was a school of thought that denied Black achievements and celebrated white supremacy and casted reconstruction as basically an illegitimate endeavor for multiracial democracy that was meant to fail.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:24] See if you told the true story of Reconstruction, you would have to admit to a series of powerful [00:20:30] progressive actions on the part of Black people, followed by violent suppression on the part of white people, and this narrative being a false one, a purposeful manipulation of the truth. This is not something that scholars have only just noticed. In 1935, W.E.B. DuBois wrote Black Reconstruction in America. This was a popular book at the time, and DuBois lays it out pretty clearly. He says the average American youth would come out of their education, "without any [00:21:00] idea of the part which the Black race has played in America, of the tremendous moral problem of abolition, of the cause and meaning of the Civil War and the relation which reconstruction had to democratic government and the labor movement today."
Nick Capodice: [00:21:17] So DuBois was saying in 1935 that Reconstruction education evades the actual truth, and it means that students aren't going to understand a massively significant era in American history, [00:21:30] or for that matter, the role that a massive percentage of our population has played in that history.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:36] DuBois points out that teaching history this way is an exercise in ego inflation and crafting an admittedly false sense of pride. Nearly 90 years later, the actual history still goes untaught because the actual history is often one of Black efforts and white backlash.
Mimi Eisen: [00:21:59] For example, [00:22:00] during Reconstruction, Black communities founded the first public school systems in the South, and then white supremacists burned over 600 school houses down. And that's definitely an underestimate. People who were once enslaved were now serving in Congress. The voter suppression and a variety of intimidation tactics ended that level of Black representation for almost a century until the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60 seconds. And these later struggles stemmed [00:22:30] in many ways from Reconstruction. And they continue today.
Nick Capodice: [00:22:35] And this idea of politically successful and powerful people who were formerly enslaved is such an important one. It's the exact opposite of that false narrative. You mentioned earlier the suggestion that reconstruction was a failure and that failure rests on the shoulders of Black citizens. I mean, that's a story of insisting on what you're promised in the promised [00:23:00] land, which is a story you'd think we'd love here in America. But in this case, we actively leave that part out. I feel like so much of what we're actually taught about this period is just this was a government project gone awry.
Mimi Eisen: [00:23:15] And this idea that Reconstruction was really, above all, a project of the federal government to officially reincorporate the former Confederate states back into the United States after the Civil War. I mean, in some standards [00:23:30] and textbook narratives, it's almost as if there are no subject acts, like there are no actual people. It's just branches of government and entire states as key actors. A lot of the time, which is really dry and also inaccurate, of course, to sort of. Separate the actions of people from the goals and the outcomes of history. And when people do show up, they're often presidents or members of Congress, state leaders or other elites. And there's a focus on the debates [00:24:00] and policies and politics between them. There's very little, if anything, on how formerly enslaved people and their coconspirators allies, coalitions at the grassroots level really organize, demanded and drove reconstruction's achievements. A lot of standards and textbooks cast Black people as objects, sort of of the government, of the economy, of white people in this period. So the core of this movement, the radical visioning and the revolution [00:24:30] to establish a much more equitable country and actually free society gets misrepresented or just lost in a lot of narratives.
Nick Capodice: [00:24:37] Alright. Standards and textbooks. I'd like to dig into that just a little more, because you said earlier that even among teachers who do their best to tell the truth about the subject, they don't have the supports for it. And I'm assuming that standards and textbooks are a big part of that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:52] Let's start with the standards issue. And by the way, that's a word that's thrown around a lot when it comes to education. A standard [00:25:00] is something that students are supposed to learn at a certain grade level. Every state sets their own. And typically the state standard for Reconstruction knowledge looks like this.
Mimi Eisen: [00:25:10] One way we see this now is in a framing of the successes versus failures of reconstruction that appears in so many standards and beyond. There's this binary of was reconstruction a success or a failure which is so common and hides, especially in the word failure, the way that white [00:25:30] supremacists very intentionally destroyed it precisely because of its successes. And another way that I'll mention is a lot of standards today still use the term carpetbaggers and scalawags, which are terms that were mainly used by white Southerners to belittle northerners who moved south carpetbaggers and white Southerners, scalawags who supported reconstruction. So they often use those descriptions without really being [00:26:00] critical of them or providing more context. And so a lot of standards and teaching materials are coming from that lost cause perspective and casting reconstruction through this white supremacist lens, whether or not the people who write or use those materials realize the extent of it.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:18] That part, whether or not the people actually writing the materials realize what they are communicating feels to me like it sums this issue up pretty well, that [00:26:30] the true history of Reconstruction has gone untaught for so long that we don't even know what we don't know. I mean, for example, even in this episode, we have been speaking about reconstruction as an era focused on Black citizenry. And it was, but it was also a nationwide project that saw the subjugation and oppression of Indigenous people, of Chinese people, of Mexican people.
Nick Capodice: [00:26:54] Also, Hannah, those words that I mentioned earlier, carpetbaggers, scalawags. I do [00:27:00] remember those words. I mean, white people moving to the south were described using these words, and the words themselves are white propaganda.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:09] Yeah, exactly. Carpetbagger is a term that was applied to white northerners who came south, perceived by many white southerners as being financial opportunists. But what was also going on is that these, quote, carpetbaggers were aligned with Republican politics. Republicans at the time, of course, were the Liberal Party. This was prior to the party's ideological [00:27:30] realignment that would come later. Many believed in democratizing the South in a free, multiracial democracy. The same went for the people who were called scalawags. Basically, those were white people who supported the fundamental tenets of Reconstruction. So those words show up in written educational materials and cloud the narrative. And speaking of those written materials.
Mimi Eisen: [00:27:53] They're not all bad, but they usually support the idea that US history is like one [00:28:00] long victory march. You can see it in the titles even, you know. And so the story of Reconstruction has to fit into that in some way. And textbooks are a different and much bigger medium than standards, which was, you know, more the focus of our report. But they reflect them in a lot of ways and they reflect a lot of the larger misconceptions around reconstruction. For example, Georgia has an eighth grade standard that asks students to basically draw a chart and compare [00:28:30] and contrast the goals and outcomes of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Ku Klux Klan. So they're saying compare the goals and outcomes of an agency created to respond to the needs of formerly enslaved people and poor white people in the South and border states at Civil War with a white terror group, as if they might be morally equivalent. And I was just looking at a textbook that describes the Klan's activities as, quote, fun and games while [00:29:00] then describing the violent reality in the margins, like there's something about a lynching in the margin. So in both there are these sorts of like staggering contrasts that make light of white terror during Reconstruction or extend some sort of like moral legitimacy to the wrong people.
Nick Capodice: [00:29:20] Fun and games with the Klan. That's galling.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:25] Yeah. And again, we're going to get deeper on the whole true history in other episodes. [00:29:30] The point here is, in part, yeah, the textbook Mimi describes wildly misrepresents a violent white group, and it also literally marginalizes the truth.
Mimi Eisen: [00:29:44] I'll also say that textbooks often refer to Reconstruction as a failure or have that like successes versus failure. Unhelpful comparisons. They tend to dedicate a lot of space to governments and white elites and ex-confederates, [00:30:00] and they often relegate marginalized people to like the actual margins of the page and different colors from the main narrative, as if they're just supplemental to the main story or accessories to it. And I remember being, you know, a middle school and high school student and, you know, you're supposed to outline a chapter of a textbook and the parts in the margins like don't count for that. You just ignore those.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:25] One last piece of the Reconstruction roadblock in our schools, Nick, is timing, [00:30:30] which is tied to standards, what our teachers have to teach and when.
Mimi Eisen: [00:30:35] The reason they're such this time crunch is that Reconstruction often appears as the halfway point in a two year chronological US history classes. So it'll fall at the beginning or end of a grade of an academic year. For example, eighth grade history courses are often designed to cover like the Constitution to Reconstruction, 1776 [00:31:00] to 1877. And so a lot of classes never get to it or they have to rush through it. Sometimes it's hard to get to the last unit of the year or there are just other things going on at that point.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:31:13] I just want to reflect on this for a moment to reinforce that what is being rushed through. Rule is the nation's first Civil Rights era, an era of immense historical importance.
Mimi Eisen: [00:31:26] Standards and curricula will also often combine the Civil War [00:31:30] and Reconstruction into one unit. Sometimes they'll even just have the Civil War era extend through 1877 and asked students to assess the damages of the war or the legacies of the war without even mentioning reconstruction, really. And so a lot of educators can end up spending several weeks on the Civil War and little to no time on its aftermath, because that's, you know, what they're expected to do.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:31:55] And again, I just want to remind us what it is. We are not supporting teaching in schools [00:32:00] here. Mimi mentioned the word revolution earlier. That's because Reconstruction was a radical time, a time of immense successes of community building and political power and resistance. I'm going to get into all of that in other episodes, but you need to know that Black citizens were running for office and winning, and those newly elected politicians implemented reforms. They established schools. They created community resources [00:32:30] so that others could establish businesses and grow wealth. They were very successful. And all of that was in the face of violent opposition. It wasn't a lost cause. It was a fierce attempt to establish an equitable society.
Mimi Eisen: [00:32:48] The fact that this revolution was cut short and how it was cut short gives so much context for where we are today because these issues that people grappled with. At the time are still among [00:33:00] the most pressing issues of today. You know, we still see disparities in education and health and wealth and labor and equal treatment under the law and surging state violence and white terror groups. And so this history gives us and our students so many insights into the world that we inherited. And when we can make those connections, as we learn about events and people who lived over 150 years ago, we can start to see patterns and see [00:33:30] ourselves and our communities in the values and goals of those people who struggle for justice in the past. And they can inform and inspire us to see our roles in history making today and to work towards a more just future. So I think it's just. An incredibly relevant period.
Nick Capodice: [00:33:52] So, Hannah, what does the future of teaching Reconstruction look like? I mean, amidst laws that have this chilling effect [00:34:00] and over 100 years of flawed scholarship and flawed resources, does Mimi see a positive path forward?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:34:08] I mean, what Mimi can do is make recommendations, right?
Mimi Eisen: [00:34:12] So one major shift would be and I know all of this is easier said than done, so, you know, it takes a lot of a lot of work and a lot of kind of efforts and a lot of people and moving parts, but to teach Reconstruction extensively at multiple grade levels [00:34:30] and not as a bookend unit at the start or end of a school year, allowing it to be a more central unit.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:34:36] Mimi also suggests that Reconstruction could be approached thematically instead of chronologically to work on that timing issue. Teaching voting rights. Reconstruction is a major touchstone. Talking about education in the US, Black citizens founded the first public school systems in the southern United States during Reconstruction.
Mimi Eisen: [00:34:55] That sort of curricular shift can be quite powerful and [00:35:00] there's no one way to do it. But just thinking about history more in that lens can help, especially as time goes on and these classes often start at the same moment in history, you know, over 400 years ago. But the years keep coming. So we got to we got to figure out what to do about that as well. You know.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:35:22] And Nick, Mimi and her team are, of course, not the only ones out there studying this period, telling the truth about this period, [00:35:30] researching and teaching and creating supports and shifting the perspective. And so this series is going to attempt to share exactly that. The truth from the mouths of those who've been studying it and shouting it from the rooftops all along. It's like Mimi says, the years keep coming. What happened during Reconstruction? It isn't just the past, it's prologue for today.
Mimi Eisen: [00:35:58] This history is so important [00:36:00] for our students and for all of us to know if it's taught accurately. It shows us that history is made at the grassroots level, that racial capitalism has a long legacy in this country, but so do blueprints and movements for an equitable future. And it shows us that progress is not guaranteed, that it's never a straight line, but it is possible and that these these possibilities open up when we see ourselves in history, when we see how much of what we encounter today is rooted in centuries old struggle [00:36:30] and know the stakes as we move forward. But what students learn about Reconstruction in school tends to be decades behind the scholarship, and that's why we're so focused on improving it.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:36:53] That's it for this episode. But it is just the beginning of our three part series on reconstruction. Keep listening. We're [00:37:00] going to delve deeper into the true history and the laws, policies and actions of the government when it came to our nation's first Civil Rights era. I strongly, warmly encourage you to go to ZinnEducationproject.org/reconstruction to see both their report and the myriad resources they're providing to help us better understand this under-taught era of American history. There's only so much we can share on this podcast, and there is an immense amount of incredible scholarship [00:37:30] out there. Music In this episode by MindMe, Water Mirrors. Chris Coral, DAJANA, Ingrid Witt, The Big Let Down and Xylo Ziko. You can get the transcript for this episode along with every other episode of Civics 101 ever made at our website civics101podcast.org. There you will find tons of resources, ways to contact us and the names of all of those who make this show happen. Speaking of, this episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Christina [00:38:00] Phillips is our senior producer. Jacqui Fulton is our producer, and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer and a huge shoutout and very special thanks to Jada Lightning for all of her help, insight and thoughts on this episode. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.