A report released January 13, 2022 by the
Zinn Education Project shows standards that influence how the Reconstruction era is taught in U.S. schools are at best inadequate. In more than a dozen states, they still reflect century-old historic distortions that justified denying Black Americans full citizenship.
Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction aims to encourage policymakers, teachers, parents, and students to advocate for more attention to the era in grades K-12.
"Teaching and learning the truth about Reconstruction is not only about correcting or supporting the historical record, though that is important," said Mimi Eisen, who co-authored the report with Ana Rosado and Gideon Cohn-Postar. "Beyond that, it is about understanding why disparities in wealth, education, health, and policing exist, the ways they are maintained, and the power of collective action in overturning them and creating a better world."
Relevance To Today
The issues people grappled with during Reconstruction, the period of progressive advances following the Civil War are among the most pressing issues we face today.
The January 6, 2021, insurrection was a reaction in part to the Black Lives Matter movement and other grassroots organizing just as the White supremacy and violence that ended Reconstruction was a racist reaction to the grassroots gains Black Americans made during that period.
At least two lawsuits invoking the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan Act (the Enforcement Act of 1871) have been filed against those who encouraged or participated in the insurrection.
During Reconstruction more than 1,500 Black Americans took public office for the first time, many in Southern districts with majority-Black populations who could now secure political representation. In the 1860s and 1870s, 16 Black Americans served in Congress, about half of whom were formerly enslaved.
To quell this surge in democracy, White supremacists seized power, imposing laws, loopholes, and intimidation tactics to suppress voting rights. Consequently, this level of Black political representation would not appear again for nearly a century.
In the decades after Reconstruction, some historians (known as the Dunning School) invented and promoted a false narrative that Reconstruction was a reckless effort that failed.
Black communities founded the South's first public education systems, starting more than 1,000 new schools. Underlining the connection between freedom and education, White supremacists destroyed at least 631 Black schoolhouses between 1864 and 1876 alone.
In the decades after Reconstruction, some historians (known as the
Dunning School) invented and promoted a false narrative that Reconstruction was a reckless effort that failed. In fact, its gains were suppressed, with both violence and racist legislation, by White elites threatened by Black progress.
"Ignorance about Reconstruction upholds White supremacy," said Jesse Hagopian, a high school teacher in Washington state, Rethinking Schools editor and co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives. "Our children deserve to be taught the truth about U.S. history. The issues at the heart of Reconstruction: political representation, civil rights, economic freedoms continue today as part of an ongoing struggle for justice."
The American Civil War Continues?
During his Atlanta speech advocating the passage of 2022 voting rights bills, President Biden calls Jan. 6 riot an attempted "coup," for the first time.
Gary, IN (79% Black) is alarmed by a state bill that would get rid of the teachers union and let the state (10% Black) appoint the local school board.
