Reconstruction as a Mirror for Today
Photo Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photos: Mathew Benjamin Brady, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Are We Still Living in a Civil Rights Era?
This week’s focus: Historical and Racial Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history, race, and identity.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1,500 words, an estimated 5½-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’re exploring the Civil Rights Movement — specifically asking, as we did in last week’s newsletter: Are We Still in a Civil Rights Era?
Our goal isn’t just to revisit familiar names and events, but to expand our understanding of the movement’s timeline, its legacy, and how engaging with this history can deepen our civic awareness and maybe even reshape what it means to be patriotic.
This week, we’re examining the Reconstruction Era — the period after the Civil War, when many Black Americans, despite facing violence and intimidation, sought and gained political power.
Did you learn about Reconstruction during your Grades K-12 education? If so, how was it taught? Was it framed as a “failure,” a “success” — and where did that framing come from?
Keep reading as we outline facts you likely weren’t taught about Reconstruction, why knowing these facts matter, and how we can connect the dots from a history lived long ago — by everyday people — to the very world we live in today.
Remember, what we are offering are some ways — not the only way — to discuss this topic.
It's important that we take action in ways that feel authentic to us. So choose what works for you — your community, your context, your needs, your goals and values.
What Was Reconstruction?
Reconstruction is often described as the time period after the Civil War — from 1865 to 1877 — when the U.S. government and everyday people aimed to “reunite” a divided country and extend human rights to the formerly enslaved — or expand rights along lines of race and other social identities.
Many advocated for an expansion of civil rights and access to social opportunity, especially Black Americans and some White allies. Formerly enslaved people — men and women — fought to reunite their families, to gain access to land, and to build churches and schools. Universities like Fisk and Howard were founded during this time.
Women were not legally allowed to vote, but many remained politically and socially active, such as Black American author, abolitionist, and suffragist, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper. In a speech, delivered to the National Women’s Rights Convention, Harper called for universal human rights and equality: “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.”
Black men advocated for voting rights and the opportunity to serve in public office, including in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. It’s estimated that up to 2,000 Black men held office during this era.
There were notable “firsts,” such as Hiram Revels, the first Black U.S. senator; and P.B.S. Pinchback, who briefly served at the first Black governor of a U.S. state. (The second Black governor wouldn’t be elected again until 1989.)
White abolitionist leaders, like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner also played key roles during Reconstruction. Stevens, in particular, pushed for the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Respectively, these amendments abolished slavery (except as punishment for a crime), granted citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the U.S. (including formerly enslaved people), and prohibited states from denying the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Racial progress, however, was unjustly met with violent, white supremacist backlash and a steady retraction of policies that had aimed to expand access and opportunity.
After President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency — pardoning many former Confederates and reversing policies like Special Field Orders No. 15. This wartime order had promised to redistribute land along the southern coast to newly freed Black families. Without access to land, many formerly enslaved people in the South had little choice but to enter into exploitative sharecropping agreements.
The Ku Klux Klan — a white supremacist organization that still exists today — was founded in 1866. The Klan used terror and violence to suppress Black communities and other marginalized groups, particularly to block access to the vote.
Many states enacted voter suppression laws, such as poll taxes (charging a fee to vote), literacy tests (requiring people to pass an exam before voting), and grandfather clauses (allowing only those whose grandfathers had voted to cast a ballot — effectively excluding most formerly enslaved men).
Reconstruction is often considered to have ended with the contested presidential election of 1876 and the resulting “Compromise of 1877.” Amid accusations of voter fraud, Congress created a special Electoral Commission to determine which candidate would receive the electoral votes from four disputed states (Florida, Louisiana, South Caroline, and Oregon). In exchange for awarding the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes, the Commission agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South — which ushered in an era of unchecked racial violence and Jim Crow segregation.
The Reconstruction era is complex. Depending on whom we consider — or whom we ask — we might see many “wins” and many “losses.”
While women still did not have full political equality, the period from 1865-1877 was arguably the most “democratic” the U.S. had been up to that point. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments enshrined basic civil rights and legal protections that still serve as the foundation of federal civil rights law today.
And yet, in classrooms across the United States, Reconstruction — a chapter marked by bold advocacy, of human rights and multiracial alliances — is often taught as a blanket “failure.”
How Reconstruction Is Typically Taught
In 2022, the Zinn Education Project released one of the most comprehensive reports on how Reconstruction is taught — or not taught — in Grades K-12 education, titled Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle.
Echoing the National Park Service, the report describes Reconstruction as one of the most “complicated, poorly understood, and significant periods in American history.” It also frames the era as a “social, economic, and political revolution.”
The report states: “Reconstruction was a moment of profound hope and devastating loss. Four million formerly enslaved people gained freedom and made strong claims on political, economic, and social equality. However, this ‘new birth of freedom’ for African Americans was met with a white supremacist backlash. With [a plethora of violence], politicians and vigilantes worked to overturn the radical promise of Reconstruction and end multiracial democracy in the South for a century.”
As reported by NPR, the Zinn report found that “90 percent of states have insufficient or non-existent lesson coverage of Reconstruction in schools.”
In the schools where Reconstruction is taught, the narrative is often shaped by a discredited perspective known as the “Dunning School,” based on the writings of Professor William A. Dunning and his students.
Zinn’s report outlines the Dunning School’s framing, which relied on racist stereotypes and historical distortions: “This school of thought portrayed Reconstruction as a period of intense political corruption where ‘ignorant’ Black people were manipulated by dishonest [White] Northern ‘carpetbaggers,’ and Southern ‘scalawags.’... Dunning infused his writing with racist interpretations of the period under the guise of historical empiricism and objectivity. As such, Dunning and his students lent academic credibility to what were actually white supremacist distortions of the Reconstruction era.”
The Zinn Education Project — along with historians like Eric Foner — argues that this problematic view still shapes U.S. curriculum, textbooks, and state standards. It sustains the false, ridiculous notion that Black Americans were “unfit” for political participation and that multiracial alliances were always doomed to fail.
The Opportunities We Create When We Expand How We Teach Reconstruction
Reconstruction is a vital chapter of U.S. history — one that cannot, or should not, be skipped. But it’s also one that deserves expansion. Here are a few ideas for how to deepen our approach:
Examine the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and how they laid the legal foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Consider how the 14th Amendment, in particular, has been cited in landmark Supreme Court cases like Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Loving v. Virginia (1967), which struck down bans on interracial marriage.
Study historical figures — like Harper, Revels, Pinchback, Stevens, Sumner and others — to highlight the power of our individual agency and collective civic engagement. Knowing people’s names and stories helps challenge damaging myths of racial “incompetence” and illustrates that multiracial alliances have long been part of U.S. history.
Trace the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era in our lives today. For example, there are current debates over the removal of statues of Conference soldiers, or renaming schools that honor similar historical figures. To participate in informed civic discussion, we must be anchored in truth and immersed in historical context and facts.
Reflect on our society today. Does equality — socially, legally, economically — extend to all? In what ways might the Reconstruction Era provide a blueprint for how we exercise our own agency and civic responsibility?
In many ways, Reconstruction provides a mirror for today.
Some historians, like Eric Foner, have referred to Reconstruction as a precursor to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s — what he has called the “Second Reconstruction.”
Borrowing that perspective for a moment, and looking at current events in the U.S. and globally — especially how rights are granted or denied based on race, gender, immigration status, citizenship and more — we might ask: Are we knocking on the doors of a “Third Reconstruction”?
Later this month, we’ll continue exploring Civil Rights, including the “era of firsts” and how to engage young people in meaningful conversations about justice, history, and change.
Stay tuned!
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