Charles Dew: The word I use to describe my becoming a racist is ‘osmosis.’ 

 

[enter music]

 

Charles Dew: I absorbed so much of that culture. 

 

Charles Dew, is a historian who grew up in Florida during the racial segregation of 1940s and 50s Jim Crow. 

 

Charles Dew: My first memories as a human being are sitting in my mother's lap having her read a children's book to me with the title is Ezekiel…. It's about a little colored boy. And that's, that's done in dialect….And my mother, who was a lovely person, deeply religious, a gentle soul, thought nothing about reading this book to me, in dialect, it's deeply racist… 

 

And you learn that racial etiquette. You don't shake hands, for example, with a person of color. You don't use Mr. or Miss or Mrs. When you're talking to a person of African American descent, you use their first names. Most houses, if they could afford it, had separate half baths off the back porch that the help quote unquote used. 

 

There was some orange China in a cupboard in the kitchen that was used by Illinois, the woman who worked for us as a domestic servant, and Ed the guy who mowed the lawn. And we learned very early as children, those dishes are not to be used by us…. 

 

[exit music]

 

And Illinois and Ed, were not to use our dishes...

 

So you grew up with that and you don't get as I say, you don't get any counter narrative. And in a way your status as a member of your family and as a white southerner depends on your continued acceptance of the Jim Crow system. 

 

Nick: You have the quote that I think Illinois, told you of ‘Why do the grownups put so much hate in the children?’ You know that really stood out to me - this idea of this mythology sort of being embedded in the culture.

 

Charles Dew: She just nailed it, she put her finger right on it. And that belief in     white supremacy, black inferiority, as toxic and as pernicious as that is, was the sort of organizing social principle of white society…. 

 

[enter music]

 

So you absorb this. And I grew up as a confederate youth. I had a confederate flag that I hung in my room…. One of my father's law partners gave me a little book called a confederate youth’s primmer: facts that historians leave out…. And it was all about how the Confederates had fought the good cause, the noble cause for states rights, that the Yankees were really responsible for slavery, because they brought them over here in slave ships, and then they sold them to us, where we treated them well. And then at the end of the Civil War, they freed this valuable property and didn't give us any money. No compensation for destroying our property and human beings….

 

[exit music]

 

When I was growing up in the south, I can remember every adult member of my family sort of shaking their head whenever the subject of Reconstruction came up, and being told Reconstruction was worse than the war…. The war costs something like 750,000 American lives. What made reconstruction worse? It was the elevation of black power during Reconstruction and the enfranchisement of black voters, which my white ancestors and white contemporaries considered an anathema…. 

 

And one of the things that justified the Jim Crow laws was this distorted, myth-encrusted picture of Reconstruction. We can't go back to that, because it was so horrible, worse than the war for God's sake. 

 

[enter music]

 

I’m Nick Fogel, and this is Fireside History 1876 - a podcast about the death of Reconstruction, the rise of the Jim Crow South, and the contested election of Rutherford Hayes.

 

Episode 6 - Those Who Control the Past

 

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Today, many historians mark the presidential election of 1876 as the end of Reconstruction, but in the summer of 1877, that was far from a sure thing. Yes, white supremacists control every southern state - and yes, the federal army has ceded control of the region to local forces largely comprised of ex-Confederates. But in many ways, the white south’s grip on power is tenuous. 

 

There are three main obstacles to lasting white rule. First, African-Americans are continuing to vote in large numbers despite widespread violence. Second, though most poor white southerners have unified under the banner of white supremacy, their loyalty is shaky - a few bad harvests might push them to work with poor Black people to overthrow the elites. And third, the federal army has not left the south. Troops are still on bases across the region, poised to reenter day-to-day life at any time.

 

So how did the white south address each of these threats - Black voting, a united Black and white working class, and renewed federal intervention? How were they able to subvert democracy and establish a system of total control? And how does the legacy of that effort continue to shape America today? 

 

[enter music]

 

On voting, Southern legislatures adopt a series of laws that don’t explicitly mention race but target Black Southerners in practice. They create complicated voter registration forms, require registration during planting season when it is difficult for Black farmers to get to town, and change voting precincts to force Black voters to travel long distances to vote.

 

They also adopt secret ballots that effectively serve as a literacy test, disproportionately impacting Black men - who suffer from illiteracy rates as high as 60%. 

 

Over time, these restrictive voting laws become more extreme. State legislatures implement property requirements, literacy tests, and poll taxes - a flat-fee that every citizen must pay regardless of income. 

 

[exit music]

 

To curtail the threat of an alliance between poor white and black voters, they introduce exceptions that allow poor white people to avoid these restrictions. They create grandfather clauses that guarantee the vote to anyone whose relatives were eligible to vote before the Civil War, which of course applies only to white people. They select white registrars to administer literacy tests and empower them to use their discretion to approve or deny applicants. Where white applicants are asked generic questions, Black people are asked questions like “How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?”

 

The impact of these laws is immediate. Black voting plummets in every southern state. In 1890, Mississippi becomes the first state to adopt these more extreme voting laws. Within two years of their passage, Black voter registration falls from over 90% of the eligible population to less than 6%. 

 

[enter music]

 

Solomon Calhoon, the President of the Mississippi convention does little to hide the lawmakers aims: 

 

Solomon Calhoon: “Let's tell the truth.... We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.”

 

James Vardaman, a state legislator at the time and a future Governor, is equally forthright:

 

James Vardaman: “There is no use to….lie about the matter….we have in our constitution legislated against the…. Negro…. When that device fails, we will resort to something else.” 

 

States across the south use Mississippi’s constitution as a model. South Carolina passes its own version in 1895. In explaining that decision, Senator and former Governor Benjamin Tillman announces:

 

Benjamin Tillman: In my State there were 135,000 negro voters…. and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters.... Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? You had set us an impossible task. We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could....

 

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By 1910, Louisiana, the state with the first Black governor, has just 730 registered Black voters - 0.5% of the eligible population. 

 

The few Black people who are able to register to vote are banned from voting in the Democratic Party’s primary elections. Since the party enjoys near-total control of the south, primary elections are the only ones that matter. Leaders argue that since the party is essentially a private club, they are free to exclude whoever they want. In 1935, the Supreme Court agrees.  

 

By the early 1900s, the white south has won back complete political power. Or as Ben Tillman, the South Carolina statesman, puts it:

 

Ben Tillman: How did we recover our liberty? By fraud and violence...We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.

 

Voter suppression that was once achieved at the point of a gun is now enshrined in law.

 

As laws are passed to restrict Black voting, others are drafted to prevent Black people from gaining economic power. They reinstate vagrancy laws, requiring people to carry passes that prove their employment, and make it illegal to look for a new job without permission from your employer. 

 

Douglas Blackmon: And vagrancy was the most pernicious and the most ubiquitous criminal law used to undermine African American men in that time…. 

 

Journalist Douglas Blackmon, the author of Slavery by Another Name, explains that most African Americans worked as farmhands or day laborers. They didn’t have pay stubs or annual contracts to prove their employment.

 

Douglas Blackmon: Men working in those kinds of roles had no capacity to prove that they were employed except to have a white person step forward and say he works for me. And so that created a reality that meant that a black man could only feel secure in the south, if he had some protection essentially from a white man of enough prominence to shield him from the nefarious actors of the world. 

 

Southern legislatures also criminalize common acts like walking along a railroad or talking loudly in the company of a white woman. Like the voting laws, these laws don’t explicitly mention race, but they are almost exclusively used to arrest Black people. If a person is arrested for a petty crime like vagrancy, they are fined. While the fine itself might amount to only a few dollars, they are also forced to pay fees associated with their arrest.

 

Douglas Blackmon: The costs included a fee that went to the deputy sheriff who arrested you, a fee that went to every person who testified against you….a fee that you paid to the court, a fee to the clerk who handled the paperwork, a fee, in some cases that went to the judge…. Just an array of these fees that quickly would add up to $100 or $150…. We're talking about a world in which a farm laborer at the very most might make $80 in a year... that is the equivalent of a typical American today being stopped for speeding, and the fine for going 10 miles over the speed limit being $40,000 or $75,000. 

 

[enter music]

 

Instead of putting convicts in jail and then having to pay for guards, food, and prison maintenance, states use a loophole in the 13th amendment that allows for slavery “as a punishment for crime” to rent prisoners out to work essentially as slaves on plantations, public works projects, or mines.

 

Douglas Blackmon: And from that point on, the company has complete and total control over the life of that prisoner: how much they're fed, which is always almost nothing, whether they receive medical care, the conditions under which they work, all of the how, how abusively they might be punished…. And worst of all, in most cases, the company also controls whether the person was actually released at the point that their labor should have paid off their fine. And it turns out that in probably 10s of 1000s of cases, once a company had obtained laborers, they just kept them as long as they were able to get away with it.

 

Blackmon estimates that at least 100-200,000 people, most of them Black, are captured by the convict-leasing system. 

 

[exit music]

 

They face unfathomable conditions. Many die on the job and mass unmarked graves are created near particularly dangerous worksites. 

 

Douglas Blackmon: Starvation, terrible sickness, incredible mortality rates. There were places that in some years, as many as 40% of all of the prisoners who were there would die in a year… There were reports where periodically, an African American family might be searching for a missing loved one. And they would pull together enough money to hire a white lawyer to try to find whatever had happened to some missing family member. 

 

[enter music]

 

And there are still today letters written by people like that, who would arrive at some remote camp cutting timber deep in the forest of South Alabama or North Florida, some place totally removed from all other human activity. And this lawyer would walk into the camp one day, and describe seeing all of the workers there naked, naked and emaciated, essentially having worked for so long, that their clothes over time just fell away from their bodies…

 

It was so inexpensive to acquire a human being…. there was a phrase: “one dies, get another.” 

 

[exit music]

 

White politicians justify the expansion of the criminal justice system by decrying a wave of Black crime and the lawlessness of Black men. But when Blackmon spent seven years digging into the arrest papers in the attics of old courthouses, he found a different story:

 

Douglas Blackmon: When I went through these 1000s, and 1000s, and 1000s, of pages of criminal records, handwritten records from that period of time, it was just clear that that just didn't happen….

 

Instead of a rise in crime, the timing of arrests corresponds to an increase in demand for cheap labor. 

 

Douglas Blackmon: And it would be that some county where nobody had been arrested for six months…. then all of a sudden, in the span of a week or two weeks, there would be 10 or 20, or 30, African American men all aged between 16 and 30, so the optimum age and physiques for labor, and they would all be arrested in a sudden surge of vagrancy or some other incredibly meaningless, claimed crime. And they would all be arrested in groups and immediately convicted as a group and shipped off to a coal mine or some other kind of work camp…. 

 

[enter music]

 

The system is a boon to state budgets. In the late 1890s, convict-leasing accounts for more than 70% of Alabama’s state revenue. It is so widely used that prisons aren’t built in the south until decades after Lee’s surrender. It also serves as a political and economic weapon. The threat of arrest hangs over the Black south - a legalized form of terror as real as the Klan and far more pervasive. At any time, anywhere, a Black man could be arrested for no real reason, sold to an abusive employer and shipped off to work in a deadly coal mine. It might happen so fast that their family would never know where they went. 

 

Douglas Blackmon: Somewhat to my astonishment, there were a few places where…you had somebody at a coal mine, sending word out to a sheriff, that, hey, we really need we need more workers, you know, send us all that you got or someone telegraphing to say, there are lots of black men congregating in this one place, and why don't you go by there and pick all of them up and send them off to Birmingham….this routine interaction in which people who wanted slave labor, were ordering it up from the criminal justice system that was more than ready to provide that, that forced labor.

 

[exit music]

​

You might be thinking: why didn’t the north object to these new laws? Where were the calls for justice and the outrage that accompanied the earlier Black Codes, the racist laws passed in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War? 

 

In fact, many northerners do speak out against the laws, and in 1890, the House passes an elections bill to protect Black voting, but…. it fails to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. Sound familiar?

 

----------------------------------------

 

But that’s not the full story. Remember, the white south is afraid of renewed federal intervention, so in the years following 1876, they wage a multipronged battle to limit the ability of the federal government to intervene. First, they try to bar federal intervention outright. While Hayes is still in office, they shut down the government for the first time in history. They refuse to pass a budget unless it guarantees the army won’t be used in southern life - meaning that it won’t be used to protect Black voters. When that fails, they turn to a different, much more effective tactic.

 

[enter music]

 

Colin McConarty: They start promoting themselves as reconciled, moderate, cooperative, and bipartisan symbols of a new south. 

 

Historian Colin McConarty notes that southerners look to cozy up to northerners in all sorts of ways. Businessmen promote a “New South” industrial economy that is hospitable to northern investors. Confederate veterans invite their Union counterparts to reenactments, and veterans of both sides publish accounts that focus less on slavery and more on military adventure. Southern politicians, desperate for unity at home, search for conflict abroad. They call for war with Spain and an expansion of the navy to increase American power in the Pacific. 

 

Colin McConarty: So through these various means, Southern congressmen presented a new face, but it was deliberately created so that when republicans try to renew Reconstruction in the south…. they can then say, ‘hey, you can trust us. We are the bipartisan reconciled people that you know.’

 

[exit music]

 

Over time, white southerners are able to use the myth of reconciliation to establish seemingly benign laws that further limit the possibility of federal intervention. 

 

Charles Dew: There is a two-thirds nominating rule for the Democratic presidential nomination, which gives the white South essentially a veto over who's going to be the presidential nominee of the party. 

 

They help usher in the modern senate filibuster and use it to repeatedly kill civil rights legislation and anti-lynching laws. 

 

They establish an unspoken political agreement with northern Democrats like FDR.

 

Charles Dew: It's an odd marriage, but it's one that gives the white South a lot of power. 

 

We can work together to pass progressive legislation as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with race. 

 

Charles Dew: You couldn't get an anti-lynching law passed, but you could get the whole new deal economic program as long as it didn't directly benefit blacks.  Agricultural laborers and domestic servants were excluded from the legislation passed that established social security in 1935. 

 

Over time, the Supreme Court also steps in to limit the threat of federal intervention. 

 

[enter music]

 

In 1875, the Court lets the perpetrators of the Colfax Massacre walk free, claiming that states, not the federal government, have the power to enforce civil rights. And a few years later they strike down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, the law that banned segregation. They claim that the 14th amendment’s guarantee of due process and equal protection applies only to harmful actions the state takes against you.

 

If individuals or private companies abuse your rights, your only recourse is to appeal to local authorities, which…. are controlled by white supremacists. 

 

Charles Dew: So the Supreme Court is signing off on what white Southerners are doing to solidify and cement their power. 

 

[exit music]

 

The court claims to be protecting the sacred ideal of state’s rights - the idea that the Constitution gave states, not Congress, power over civil rights. But in practice, they are turning a blind eye to racial discrimination and violence. State and local authorities have no interest in protecting Black rights. Without the threat of federal intervention, southerners begin segregating every aspect of society. 

 

In 1895, the court formally legalizes this segregation in the landmark Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, which establishes the principle of “separate but equal.” 

 

With Black voting effectively banned and the threat of renewed federal intervention neutralized, the white south works to prevent the rise of a working class party comprised of poor Black and white people. Political alliances between poor white and Black voters sprang up at various points during Reconstruction, and in 1890, Tom Watson of Georgia helps lead an especially strong populist bid to seize power from the elites.

 

Tom Watson: “You are made to hate each other because on that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded because you do not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system that beggars you both. The colored tenant is in the same boat as the white tenant…"

 

To beat back the threat of working class movements, white southern elites turn to the familiar tool of racism. They launch intense campaigns of violence and dehumanization. Stereotypes - the lazy Black worker, the rapacious Black man - become even more widespread. Lynchings become commonplace. Scientific racism, a flawed effort to apply Darwin’s theory of evolution to prove white superiority, becomes a popular subject, taught in schools and colleges.  

 

But justifying all of these tactics - the attacks on Black voting, the weaponization of the criminal justice system, the cozying up to northerners with the image of a “reconciled south” - is a larger strategy: change the history.

 

[enter music]

 

Michael Moore: There's an old African adage that says that until the lion gets its own historian, the history of the hunt will always favor the hunter….

 

This is Michael Moore, the founding President of the International African American Museum.

 

Michael Moore: And in this context, I think what that means is that... people who were aligned with the Confederacy were the ones who had control of the narrative of history and therefore the Lost Cause approach began to take root, and people who were enslaved were marginalized, and their stories were lost.

 

By 1876, the white south had already begun to rewrite the history of slavery and the war. 

 

[exit music]

 

The revisionist history of the Lost Cause was already preaching the virtues of antebellum society - the supposed harmony between slaves and masters - and describing the war as a noble struggle to protect states rights. 

 

Why not create a similar revisionist history for Reconstruction? Why not blame Reconstruction’s demise on the inability of Black leadership? Why not claim that Reconstruction wasn’t a time of hope and possibility but one of corruption and mismanagement? Why not teach that the real issue wasn’t the Klan, but the federal army and a bloated Washington government, which was subverting the will of the people? 

 

Colin McConarty: Now, as you get into the 1880s, and 1890s, that's when we really see democrats taking an increasingly radical stance in regards to trying to change and rewrite the history of the Civil War and of reconstruction.

   

These ideas are circulating in the 1870s but the campaign to enshrine them in textbooks, statues, and museums soon kicks into high gear. 

 

By 1900, these ideas have gone mainstream, led in large part by Charles Dunning, a prominent historian at Columbia University. 

 

Charles Dew: He wrote up a general history of reconstruction.... And he talked about the blackout of honest government in the south about carpetbaggers, scalawags, Negros, all of whom were unfit to rule, basically taking over the South at the point of a federal bayonet - military occupation of the south and that white Southerners had responded appropriately by seeking to restore honest government.

 

Dunning became the preeminent Reconstruction historian.

 

Charles Dew: And he had graduate students at Columbia, almost all of whom were white young men from the south, who did individual histories of Reconstruction in separate southern states, often states they had come from, and they just expand on and embellish that Dunning stereotype….

 

With Dunning’s stamp of legitimacy, the white south’s version of history became accepted as fact. 

 

[enter music]

 

Madeleine Ramsey: What's so fascinating about this war is that typically the phrase is: ‘winners write history,’ and that's not what happened in the United States. The losers wrote the history.

 

And so the truth was buried. As historian Madeleine Ramsey explains, for more than sixty years, children learned about Reconstruction as an abomination - a time of misrule and corruption. 

 

Madeleine Ramsey: In a Virginia textbook in 1964 - so almost a hundred years after the end of the civil war - it says this: “a feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes.” So textbooks as late as the 1960s and seventies are still echoing this whole faithful slave trope that was of course entirely untrue.

 

The violence of the Klan and other white terrorists was ignored or even celebrated. They were the crusaders for civilization, protecting innocent white women and southern values. Here’s historian Shawn Alexander.

 

Shawn Alexander: The Southern Historical Society also joins the fight, if you will, propagating ideas and information, putting it out there publishing it in the newspapers, stories, versions of pop history of the war itself, slavery, etc, and basically launches into this war of ideas that will continue throughout the late 19th century, and really set up the 20th century, in many ways, probably echoing what we're still fighting today when we were looking at the taking down of Confederate monuments. 

 

[exit music]

 

Charles Dew: The blackout of honest government was a phrase that was used. Corruption…. They constructed this whole narrative of what happened in reconstruction. And that got picked up in American popular culture, it got picked up by Hollywood.

 

In 1915, the novel The Clansman was adopted into the movie The Birth of a Nation, which trumpeted the Dunning School version of Reconstruction to record audiences. 

 

Charles Dew: And every myth about reconstruction, every negative myth, you can imagine is contained in that book. And was was replicated on stage and then on film.

 

The movie depicted Black people as lazy, uncivilized, and barbaric - and the Ku Klux Klan as noble protectors. A new generation, raised on the Lost Cause, accepted the movie as gospel. It became the first movie aired at the White House. Klan chapters, which had been dormant since Reconstruction, began to reorganize. Klansmen handed out recruiting pamphlets to moviegoers and paraded on horseback in front of theaters. Ushers donned white sheets.

 

Charles Kuralt: By 1925 the Ku Klux Klan was big business. Almost 6 million Americans now belonged to the Klan and the organization was grossing 75 million dollars a year. 

 

CBS News: When such an order as this moves in takes over the police power, you are completely at their mercy, and their atrocities and their violence can be visited on anybody who disagrees with them in any situation.

 

In 1919, the three largest Confederate heritage groups established a committee to promote the Lost Cause in textbooks. The committee became known as the Rutherford Committee after the group’s well-known, pro-slavery historian Mildred Rutherford. It was chaired by a former Confederate general - a man who founded the Carolina Rifle Club as an alternative to the KKK and who called emancipation the “greatest social crime of all the ages.” 

 

The committee produced a report known as “A Measuring Rod to Test Textbooks,” which called on textbooks to include key ideas like: “The north was responsible for the war between the states…The War between the States Was not Fought to Hold the Slaves…[and] The Slaves Were Not Ill-Treated in the South and the North Was largely Responsible for their Presence…” They then used their influence to pressure states into adopting these standards. For decades, some 70 million children read textbooks that conformed to the measuring rod report’s ideas.

 

[enter music]

 

There were those who resisted the propaganda. Ida B. Wells, a child of slavery, risked her life to report on lynchings throughout the south. 

 

Ida B. Wells: Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an “unwritten law” that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal.

 

As a threat to white supremacy herself, Wells became a target. She received death threats, her newspaper offices were destroyed, and she was forced to leave the south.

 

[exit music]

 

There were others too. W.E.B. DuBois’ work exposed the role white terrorism played in ending Reconstruction. Nellie Francis defied Klan threats to successfully lobby her state of Minnesota to pass an anti-lynching bill. Countless ordinary citizens risked their lives to testify before Congress and court. 

 

These efforts created the building blocks for change, but for decades, they were kept out of the public eye.

 

[enter music]

 

White southerners fought to keep the Lost Cause front and center. They erected statues and built museums. They organized textbook committees and seized control of school boards. And they suppressed anything that challenged the Lost Cause narrative. The massacres of Black people in Memphis, New Orleans, and Colfax; the burning of Black communities in Wilmington and Tulsa; became forgotten events, confined to an untouchable bin of history alongside the successes of the Reconstruction-era governments.

 

Charles Dew: If you believe in white supremacy, it's a total belief system. It's sort of a tapestry that has got to be preserved intact. And if you let one, one party begin pulling on the thread of white supremacy, there's a spirit that the whole tapestry is going to unravel. And the whole thing's going to come down. So you set the barricades around the entire concept of white supremacy and everything involved in sustaining it. And you defend that to the bitter end. 

 

[exit music]

 

So where does all of this leave us today? 

 

When I started working on this podcast, the story of Reconstruction - with its promise of a more just democracy followed by the terrorism that brought about its demise - was largely ignored. While most schools weren’t teaching Reconstruction as a failure, many were passing over it all together. In thirteen years of public school, I spent two days on Reconstruction. 

 

For many, the story of America skips from Lee’s surrender at the end of the Civil War to World War I without missing a beat.   

 

That gap in our collective history is dangerous.

 

It warps our understanding of war and peace, hiding decades of terror and guerrilla warfare behind a tidy story of a 4-year struggle that abolished slavery and ended with the embrace of brothers at Appomattox. 

 

It warps our understanding of our racial history, obscuring more than a century of state-sponsored violence, slavery, and theft - but also generations of struggle, hope, and - at times, progress towards greater racial equality. 

 

[enter music]

 

Hilary Green: This was one of the most successful demonstrations of biracial democracy that we've had…. (59:14) And I think we need to learn from a group of people who came out of slavery with nothing and built democracy and the nation from the ground up that was racially inclusive, diverse, and recognized everyone as citizens….These people had nothing but hope and how do we remind ourselves of hope matters and working purposefully to a better, inclusive future is possible because we have this historical legacy.  

 

Madeleine Ramsey: This country has never dealt with the legacy of slavery. We have never come to terms with what it means that the underpinnings of this country were built on the backs of men and women….Like our very institutions, both literally and figuratively were built by enslaved people….

 

It warps our understanding of politics. The white south didn’t come to power by winning the debate of the day - it came to power by systematically suppressing voters, by crafting racist laws to solidify its advantage, and by using violence to keep people in line. 

 

Greg Downs: What's at stake is not just bad history, or historical error, but it's bad political thinking. By which I mean, how do we understand how politics operates? And that as long as we hope for a mythical Savior, or a Supreme Court that will salvage everything or a slightly different set of wording in a constitutional amendment that would save everything, we fail to understand basically how politics works…. and that it's not something that's just a gesture or a posture or hope for someone else. But it's a commitment to action; politics is doing.

 

[exit music]

 

And, finally, it warps our understanding of ourselves. The arc of history doesn’t automatically bend towards justice, but it can, if we make it. 

 

Madeleine Ramsey: There's this great quote about America post-1960s. So after you've had this huge civil rights movement…. and it said ‘Americans accept the premise of racial equality, but often do not support it with the means to achieve it.’ That quote could sum up Reconstruction, that quote can sum up America post 1968, that quote can sum up America now.

 

[enter music]

 

In the two years I’ve spent developing this podcast, I’ve seen the echoes of Reconstruction play out on the streets of America. I’ve seen mass protests sparked by police killings of unarmed black men, the attempted theft of an election, and a confederate flag in the Capitol. And I’ve seen an escalation in the long war for control of our historical narrative. 

 

History, especially our history on race, has become one of the defining issues in American politics. Parents are protesting school board meetings, teachers are being threatened, and lawmakers across the country are passing laws defining what historical lessons can and cannot be taught. 

 

NPR News: According to Ed Week, as of June 18, 25 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to restrict education on racism and bias. That includes five states, Texas, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma and Tennessee, where bills have already been signed into law.  

 

Determining where we as a society go from here is a complicated question, but if the history of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow has taught us anything, it’s that to have a productive conversation about where we should go, we need to have an accurate understanding of where we’ve been. As James Baldwin once wrote: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." 

 

[exit music]

 

[enter music]

 

If you want to learn more about Reconstruction, check out Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War” and Douglas Blackmon’s “Slavery By Another Name,” both of which are films developed in collaboration with PBS. The historians featured on this podcast also have incredible research on this era.

 

And if you want to get involved in the effort to resist restrictions on voting, consider supporting organizations like the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund or Fair Fight Action, reach out to your elected officials, and volunteer to work as a poll worker or poll watcher. 

 

Fireside History is produced by me, Nick Fogel. It is edited by Iris Adler. Scoring and sound engineering by Jason Albert and Hannah Barg. Voice acting from Kilo Martin and Sara Young. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions and The Plantation Singers. Special thanks to Charles Dew, Douglas Blackmon, Colin McConarty, Michael B. Moore, Shawn Alexander, Madeleine Forrest Ramsey, and Hilary Green.