Griffith's cinematic masterpiece—a record-breaking, box-office hit from the earlyth century—is a white Southerner who helps form the Ku Klux Klan to free the South from the supposed tyranny of Reconstruction-era Blacks.
The film, with its electrifying performances, spectacular special effects, and provocative story, captivated white audiences and drew vigorous protests from African-American civil rights organizations such as the NAACP.
Includes a fantastic sampling of primary source documents. The Freedmen's Bureau The Freedmen's Bureau Online, an impressive assemblage of Bureau records, sorted by state and including records on marriage, freedmen's labor, and "murders and outrages.
Over 1, sources on various aspects of Southern history, with a subject index. Declaring Freedom for All The Emancipation Proclamation , original and transcript, can be checked out here. The school was named after the famous British abolitionist, William Wilberforce.
When the school failed to meet its financial obligations, leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church purchased it in Wilder explains how fugitive slaves, once escaped to Union lines, liberated fellow slaves and spread the word of freedom deep in Confederate territory.
Attempting to Revert to Days of Bondage Shortly after a new state constitution abolished slavery in Maryland in , a Unionist observer described the efforts of local citizens to nullify the former slaves' freedom. Protesting for True Freedom In , Black men who'd been forcibly impressed to perform military labor for the Union Army addressed an indignant petition to General Benjamin F.
Here are the arguments raised for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Seeking Justice and Equality At the end of the war, Black soldiers stationed near Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau to protest the suffering of their wives, children, and parents at a settlement on Roanoke Island, North Carolina.
Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. Reconstruction Introduction When the Civil War ended, there was just a giant smoking crater where American society used to be. Oh, and four million people were suddenly freed. It was the best of times, but honestly, it was mostly the worst of times.
Brace yourselves: history is coming. Music Chris Vallillo, Abraham Lincoln in Song Contemporary roots singer-songwriter Chris Vallillo honors his fellow Illinois-ian as well as his state's deep musical traditions with this masterpiece of slide guitar twang and mesmerizing vocals. Tired of ads? Join today and never see them again. Get started. After completing the activity, students will email to the teacher their responses to the following questions: What evidence did you see in the documents which illustrated significant change occurring?
What evidence depicted things staying the same? Taking into account information from the documents as well as the introductory discussion on revolutions, answer the guiding question: To what extent was Reconstruction a revolution? Part 2 in their groups or individually, or the teacher may continue to Part 2 as a whole class discussion session.
Teaching instructions for What Extent was Reconstruction a Revolution? Part 2 are located here. The student activity is here.
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Skip to content Reconstruction was a tumultuous period in American history, and the question of whether it produced lasting change in regard to civil rights is still debated by scholars. House Joint Resolution proposing the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, December 7, ; from the General Records of the United States Government The amendment was ratified by the states on February 3, When students have formed definitions for revolution, begin Part 1 of the DocsTeach Activity.
Share this: Twitter Facebook. Next post Professional Development at the George W. White terrorists persisted, and the number of lynchings peaked in the s, but lynching a thousand black men turned out to be an inefficient way to disenfranchise a million black voters.
For that, the law was needed, and Mississippi pioneered the development of devilishly clever statutes that could effectively disenfranchise blacks without technically violating the Fifteenth Amendment. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests not only worked to eliminate most black voters from the rolls, they had the added benefit to the white elite of eliminating substantial numbers of poor whites as well.
The political threat of a populist coalition was destroyed, and Reconstruction was overthrown. To justify the new order, white leaders ratcheted up the rhetoric and practice of white supremacy. Laws mandating racial segregation proliferated. By the early twentieth century, theorists posited the existence of dozens of races.
But blacks were the primary victims, especially in the South. In the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Central to the ideological justification of the Jim Crow era was a new interpretation of the Civil War that removed all references to slavery. In the North, monuments to the Emancipation Proclamation gave way to celebrations of the Gettysburg Address, which made no explicit mention of slavery.
Across the South, the United Daughters of the Confederacy spearheaded the construction of monuments celebrating the leaders of the rebellion and formed textbook committees to ensure that a pro-Confederate version of Civil War history prevailed in schools. In both scholarly and popular accounts, slavery was romanticized as a paternalistic institution ideally suited to an inferior race.
In Du Bois helped found the Niagara Movement, an all-black group that agitated against lynching. But when a number of blacks were lynched in Springfield, Illinois—the former home of Abraham Lincoln—black leaders realized they would need the support of prominent whites.
In one sense, the founding of an interracial civil rights organization represented a continuation of a long tradition in American politics stretching back to the abolitionist movement. Foner and Gates have each written new books that add nuance and detail to the story told in the PBS series. He shows how each of them had its origins in the antislavery constitutionalism of the pre—Civil War abolitionist movement.
Yet each was also the product of the specific moment in which it was proposed and ratified. All three had shortcomings. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection of the law but failed to specify exactly what rights the amendment protected. Rather than establish a general right to vote, the Fifteenth Amendment banned franchise restrictions based on race, thereby enabling a later generation to devise other ways of removing blacks en masse from the voting rolls.
But for all their limitations, Foner emphasizes, the Reconstruction amendments were an enormous achievement, not only in meeting the issues confronting Americans in the s and s, but in setting a standard of freedom and equality that subsequent generations have appealed to, often successfully, in the continuing struggle for civil rights.
A short chapter breezes through the history of Reconstruction before reaching the subject that has fascinated Gates ever since he was an undergraduate: the contrast between the culture of white supremacy and the counterculture of the New Negro that emerged in the late nineteenth century with the overthrow of Reconstruction and reached its apogee in the Harlem Renaissance of the s. Part monograph, part exhibition catalog, the book is packed with an array of reproductions documenting the appalling variety of racist images that infected American culture by the early twentieth century.
Those crude depictions stand in stark relief against the literary sophistication and dignity of the leading lights of the New Negro movement—among them the poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and the novelists Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer.
Less stark, but no less real, is the difference in the way Foner and Gates approach their material. Foner places Reconstruction within the setting of a much older struggle for justice in the antislavery movement, and he sees later campaigns for civil rights as building on their predecessors. He posits an enduring conflict between democracy and equality on the one hand and racism and injustice on the other, and, crucially for Foner, the outcome of that conflict at any given moment comes down to a balance of power, primarily political power.
Worse, it indicates a disturbing return to the kind of quasi-biological reasoning employed by the very white supremacists Gates so effectively exposes. Their purpose and effect is to deny the manifest reality of historical change.
Nevertheless, one of the most impressive aspects of the PBS series is how often it cuts against the overly racialized dichotomy between white supremacy and black resistance. On camera, one scholar after another points out that what was most threatening to Southern white elites was the very real possibility of a popular, democratic coalition of whites and blacks. Vincent Brown sees interracial coalitions as a powerfully redemptive strain of American history.
Kate Masur notes that significant numbers of Southern whites were Unionists who had opposed secession and who, during Reconstruction, often voted Republican. But the scholars he interviewed see something else at work: white elites ramped up the rhetoric of white supremacy in the effort to break any alliance of poor whites and blacks.
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