American History Tellers - Reconstruction Era | Counter Narratives | 7

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

After Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, Reconstruction officially came to an end, and the battle to control the narrative began. For the next century, white Southerners espoused the Lost Cause mythology, shifting the blame for the failure of Reconstruction onto Northern interlopers and Black citizens supposedly “unready” for freedom. Today, Lindsay is joined by University of Colorado Professor Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders to discuss the legacy of Reconstruction, and how Black scholars and communities have worked to counter the Lost Cause narrative, even up to today.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersSupport us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's September 1906 in Charleston, South Carolina. You're the only Black teacher at a segregated, all-black school. It's the end of the first day of the fall semester, and you're standing in the doorway to your classroom, ushering your sixth graders out the door. As the last student leaves, your body sags with exhaustion. You walk to the blackboard and pick up a rag to start erasing the afternoon's lesson. You turn around to see your

boss, Principal Davis, enter. He's a stern, middle-aged white man. You wipe the chalk off your hands and fix a smile to your face. Good afternoon, Mr. Davis. Is there something I can help you with? Afternoon. I just wanted to make sure everything's in order. I know it's your first year teaching the sixth grade. Thank you. The students are settling in well. But there is something I wanted to talk to you about. It's these new textbooks. You walk to your desk and pick up a brown cloth-bound book. Mr. Davis raises an eyebrow. What about them?

You turn the book over in your hands, choosing your words carefully. I've been looking forward to teaching the students about the history of our people. But sir, this textbook has got it all wrong. It blames the North for starting the Civil War. It portrays the black politicians elected during Reconstruction as villains. It says the Ku Klux Klan was necessary to protect white people from black people. This book has been approved by the school district. I'm sure the superintendent knows better than a young woman

with barely two years of teaching experience. But it's falsifying history, sir. Mr. Davis's face tightens. You're lucky to even have new books. Most colored schools only get textbooks that are falling apart at the binding after the white children are through with them. And it's time we purge Yankee lies from our classroom. You shake your head and open the book to a page you dog-eared.

But sir, just listen to what it says. Page 16. The South has always been the Negro's friend. As a rule, the slaves were comfortably clothed, given an abundance of wholesome food, and kindly treated. That's an outright lie. My grandfather was born a slave. He told me what it was really like. These children need to learn the truth.

Mr. Davis takes a step closer to you. What these children need is to learn to follow the rules. And so do you. You better fall in line if you want to keep your job. With a cold glare, he turns and walks out of the classroom. You don't want to give him a reason to fire you. But as you look up at the Confederate flag that hangs over the door, your anger hardens to resolve.

You know you have to find some way to teach your students the truth. Hey, this is Nick. And this is Jack. And we just launched a brand new podcast called The Best Idea Yet. You may have heard of it. It's all about the untold origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge?

Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In the decades following the Civil War, white Southerners embraced a mythology known as the Lost Cause.

It was a movement to distort the history of the South's motivations for going to war and the reasons behind the failure of Reconstruction. Proponents of the Lost Cause used monuments and textbooks to downplay the horrors of slavery, portray the Confederacy as a noble struggle for Southern rights, and depict Reconstruction as a time of Northern tyranny and Black misrule. In the early 1900s, so-called memorial groups, like the sons and daughters of the Confederacy, took their battle to rewrite history into Southern schools. They persuaded school districts across the South to ban textbooks they disagreed with and replace them with books that promoted the Lost Cause. As this Lost Cause mythology took hold, the task of challenging this revisionist history fell to Black parents,

grandparents, churches, and community organizations. Here with me now to discuss the end of Reconstruction, as well as the origins of the Lost cause narrative, is Dr. Ashley Lawrence Sanders. She's an assistant professor of U.S. and African American history at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of the upcoming book, They Knew What the War Was About, African Americans and the Memory of the Civil War. She also served as a consultant on our series about the Reconstruction era. Our conversation is next. Ashley Lawrence Sanders, welcome to American History Tellers.

Hi, Lindsay. Thank you for having me. Why don't we start in 1877, the year federal troops withdrew from the South. In the wake of the Civil War, Black politicians, Black businesses, Black churches, Black schools, they'd all flourished. But what happened in the aftermath of the withdrawal of federal troops toward the end of this reconstruction period? It was a pretty devastating moment, I think. On the one hand, politically admit, in some states, the fairly immediate overturn of state governments to white Southern Democrats, some of the very people that actually perpetrated the worst violence of the election of 1876, and some congressmen, some local mayors, some city councils, some sheriffs were ushered out of power.

I think psychologically for African-Americans, though, it was sort of a defeatist point for them because they had fought so hard to maintain so many of the rights they had gained in the Civil War and throughout the Reconstruction period. When the federal troops left, I think it was the final sign that the U.S. government itself had given up on this very important project of Reconstruction. You know, as we've seen, these troops did not prevent a lot of the worst violence. the U.S. government itself had given up on this very important project of reconstruction. You know, as we've seen, these troops did not prevent a lot of the worst violence of reconstruction. But I think in the end, the signaling that there would be no more federal support for this program was pretty devastating for what the future would look like for African Americans.

So if 1877 was the end of reconstruction era, as we popularly know it, why were the federal troops removed? Well, I always like to say that there's this immediate end, right, to Reconstruction, which is this really complicated election of 1876, which is an election that, if we could call it a messy, corrupt election, I think we can call it that, right? On the state level in many of the southern states, it's incredibly violent. A lot of Black voters are physically intimidated, violently intimidated away from the polls. There's a lot of direct corruption, election corruption, literally stuffing ballots. And so there's disputes in many states, right, which leads to this compromise of 1877, which we get Rutherford B. Hayes becoming the president. But also Reconstruction loses favor

in the North years before we get to this 1877 moment. There is this argument that enough has been done in the South for Black people, for freedmen. There's corruption around reconstruction programs, that Black politicians are not capable of doing their jobs. There is these negative sort of, you know, cartoons and feelings in the North within the Republican Party, which has been mostly supportive of reconstruction as well. So I think we've seen, before we get to this moment, violence in Southern states that precipitates some of the incredible violence of 1876, the loss of support within even the stronghold of the Northern Republican Party, and of course, the election compromise of 1877, which leads to Hayes deciding to withdraw the troops from the South.

I'm glad you brought up the popular opinion, the negative feelings toward Reconstruction that developed in the North that eroded support for it in the American populace, because this is a reminder of how important the narrative is, the direction of popular opinion. And many people want to control the narrative by changing particular aspects of the popular thinking. So one of the most reviled and probably pernicious changing the narrative would be the lost cause narrative. What is that and where did it come from?

The lost cause narrative emerges actually very soon after the Civil War ends. And it starts mostly encompassing these myths around the Civil War itself. It says that the war was not about slavery, that slavery itself was a benign institution that was largely beneficial to Black people, that, you know, the South went to war for states' rights, for this glorious cause, that they had no chance of actually winning the war. This is why it's called a lost cause. And we know that was not true, right? We know that this was a difficultly fought war up until these important turning points of 1863 and 1864. But then when we get to Reconstruction, they start these myths around Reconstruction being Negro rule and corrupt rule and Black people being unprepared for freedom.

And eventually this sort of school of scholarship, the Dunning School, emerges to say that some of the things that happened during Reconstruction, it was a failure because Black people were unprepared for freedom. Parts of the Lost Cause also start to argue that because of Black armed violence, organizations like the KKK emerged because they were sort of so oppressed during Reconstruction that they needed to form in order to defend their own rights. So there's parts of the Lost Cause that encompass a Civil War narrative, and then it starts to emerge to encompass a narrative that justifies the end of Reconstruction as this really bad period because freedmen having these rights. And of course, that narrative emerges and actually gets reinforced in the late, late 19th century, the turning point of the 20th century, right when we get the first sort of establishment of these Jim Crow laws that conveniently say, well, all those rights that you had during Reconstruction, well, we're just going to take them away now.

You mentioned Dunning and the Dunning School. I wonder if you could describe what those terms are. William Archibald Dunning was a historian at Columbia University, and he and several historians that he trained started a school of scholarship, I would say started, but maybe popularized a school of scholarship, which actually proliferated several books about Reconstruction, which argued that Reconstruction was a failure because of what they would call Negro rule or Black overrule or Black corruption or the ill-preparedness of Black people for freedom or the overreach of the federal government in giving Black people these rights at this

time. And some of this scholarship actually justified the rise of organizations like the KKK or whitewashed the rise of organizations like the KKK as well. Denning himself was not Southern. Many of his acolytes were. This was a popular school of thought in academia that then made it to K through 12 education. I would say up until, well, in some places,

you know, mid 20th century to 1960s and 1970s, right? Mainstream academic historical scholarship does not really revise this until we get maybe into the mid-20th century. And what some would call Southern legacy organizations were formed in the wake of Reconstruction as well, right? Can you tell us what some of those were and how they worked to control the narrative? Sure. So these organizations are, you know, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They have like

Children of the Confederacy, too, which is one of the UDC's, the United Daughters of the Confederacy sort of big missions is to actually push, you know, a lot of these myths onto children. They actually explicitly say this. So one of the things that happens in the 1890s when these organizations form is that we also see the first Confederate monuments that start to pop up across the South. Many of these monuments, the most prominent ones, are erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They're a women's club. As the name suggests, many of them are daughters of Confederate veterans. And they say that they form within this time period because the North has dominated and they're spreading this false history of the Civil War. And they say that they form within this time period because the North has dominated and

they're spreading this false history of the Civil War and they have to spread the real true history of the war. So they start to write their own textbooks about the war and they start to erect these monuments to the glorious cause that we see throughout all these Southern cities and Southern landscapes and not just in Southern cities, I have to also add. We see monuments and plaques and stuff as far as New York, right, and Ohio and all these places as well. They have an enormous reach. And the impact that they have is incredible because the history that they spread, that the war was not about slavery, it's about states' rights, they actually nationalized for a very long time.

And all of this is happening in parallel with the emergence of violence groups like the KKK you've mentioned. Were they the only group? No. And in fact, during Reconstruction, the KKK is actually, for a time, a very major player, but they are an organization that the federal government focuses very strongly on and is able to actually diminish their power for a period of time through a series of very strong federal legislation and enforcement acts. You know, there's several iterations. This is what we call the first iteration of the KKK is actually not as powerful as some of the organizations that emerged later, like the white shirts, the red shirts, for example, that are very powerful in South Carolina and North Carolina, actually in the end do a lot more damage than the KKK does because the red shirts are more explicitly affiliated with the Democratic Party in the South. So what we see is that the red shirts align

themselves with specific political candidates with the specific political mission of getting certain candidates of power and actually ushering elected officials out of office. So we see these types of organizations, White Camellia, you know, they're also powerful. KKK is not the only organization at that time. And by the time that Reconstruction ends, they're no longer the major player when it comes to the amount of violence that's being wielded. So I'd like to explore kind of the pernicious consequence of the rewriting of the narrative and the violent propping of it up. I went to high school and studied American history at a public school in Texas.

And my only recollection of the Reconstruction period from that classroom is that it was a time of meddling by Northern carpetbaggers. How did you learn about Reconstruction? I do not remember learning much about Reconstruction. What I learned about the Civil War was that the Civil War was not about slavery. I explicitly heard that a couple of times throughout middle school and high school, and that was not that long ago. And I grew up in South Carolina, where, of course, much of the violence and much of what happens during Reconstruction hinges on South Carolina. So I think this was a deliberate thing, is what I'm going to say, is that we don't learn a lot about Reconstruction in South Carolina because a lot of it is not good. Because a lot of what happens in South Carolina is the deliberate overthrow of Democratic elected governments,

violence against Black people, massacres of Black voters and Black citizens throughout the state in service of overturning Black political power in the state as one of the actual centers of Black political power in the South, in South Carolina. I think that narrative was deliberately erased. We learned quite a bit about the Civil War, but we never really learned that it was ever about slavery in any way. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments,

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So when you think back to your time in South Carolina growing up in high school, so not much was talked about Reconstruction. And I suppose not much was really talked about the shocking violence and massacres in New Orleans and in Memphis, or even the incredible progress that was made and then snatched away. This is a time that is just not known by Americans. How did you discover it? And what was your feeling when you found what was probably the truer history of Reconstruction?

I was never really taught it in school, but I did learn quite a bit of Black history outside of school. I came from a family that was really into learning Black history on our own. My family was enslaved on both my mother and father's side in South Carolina, as far back as we know, probably at least the early 19th century. My parents would buy every type of encyclopedia that ever existed. You know, some of the encyclopedias we had were the Ebony Black History Encyclopedias, which were written by a great historian, Lerone Bennett, who was not an academically trained historian, but wrote several great Black history pieces for Ebony Magazine

and Johnson Publishers. And he wrote these volumes of Black history. So I read those as a kid, and they had so much about Reconstruction. So I learned so much that way. I learned the community programs. My parents, what they knew, my mother went to a high school that was named after Robert Smalls, who was one of the first Black congressmen during Reconstruction. Of course, he was also the Robert Smalls, who is a Civil War hero as well. So, you know, she always knew that story about Robert Smalls and always knew that he was the first Black congressman and always made sure that we knew these stories as well. You know, I went to Black church, the AME church, and we had church programs. I was Harriet Tubman in a black history

pageant, you know, and I was in a black history quiz bowl in high school, as I like to tell people all the time. Me and my cousins won two years in a row. And then when I got older and just reading more and more of my own, I was just flabbergasted that South Carolina had this really Black radical history that was so covered up, so learning that all these things happened during Reconstruction. And I heard about the Kenhoi riot, which happened down the street from where I lived. It was kind of mind-blowing that there was this entire time period in history that just nobody really taught about. Nobody taught students that there was a time period where actually the government was invested in like, how do we help 4 million people that were enslaved

transition to freedom? But at the same time, it's not just about those 4 million people. How do we make our nation to a better nation? Because the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment are also about making the nation better. They established rights that have made the nation better for many people, not just African Americans. So it's a mind-blowing thing that it just was not taught to anyone, let alone to us in South Carolina. Well, congratulations on winning the quiz bowl twice. But it wasn't just communities and families and churches that maintained this counter-narrative or this history. Certainly, there was a Black intellectual class, writers like Carter G. Woodson and W.B. Du Bois.

How did they write and think about Reconstruction? Woodson and Du Bois, these are two Harvard-educated historians. I would say even before them in the late 19th century, people who lived through Reconstruction were writing about these times, too. They weren't academically trained historians in the same way. People like George Washington Williams and others wrote about these times also. Carter G. Woodson, he gets his Ph.D. and I don't know which number he is, but he's one of the first Black people to get his Ph.D. from Harvard. And his parents were enslaved. So you have to think about this path that he comes on, right? And what he does is that he writes as an actively trained historian,

but his mission is to also make sure that this can be proliferated to the Black community. So he founds the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. And it's now called Association for Study of African American Life and History. We call it ASALH. It's still an active organization. There's the Journal of Negro History, which is now the Journal of African American History, where they publish academic articles. And it has an end to it like the Negro History Bulletin, which is very much aimed towards the general public, teachers, children. Asala also has chapters throughout the country where ordinary people can come and learn

about Black history. Du Bois himself, I call him a scholar activist. Du Bois lives to be 90-something years old, and Du Bois' work on Reconstruction is so formative for the scholars who come after him, he does not get probably the credit at the time because Black scholars are not part of the mainstream academy. They teach mostly in historically Black colleges and universities. Some of them don't even teach in universities. Some of them teach in K-12 schools if they teach. But Du Bois, he writes Black Reconstruction in the 1930s, and he completely turns the Dunning School on its head and says, no, the Reconstruction era did not fail because Black people were ill-prepared for freedom. This was a revolutionary moment, starting with the

Civil Rights Movement. And with Du Bois' rights in this really centering Black-freed people as part of this, a Reconstruction study actually forms the foundation of Eric Foner's Reconstruction, which is what people consider the seminal book about Reconstruction now. And, you know, Foner gives all credit to Du Bois. But at the time when Du Bois writes this, it doesn't get the mainstream attention. But their work is important for creating the Black counter-narrative within the historical scholarship as intellectuals. And they're not the only ones, right? There is a whole community of Black historical scholarship written by Black men and women, and that's being filtered down in an accessible way for children and for K-12 teachers to be able to use.

So what Woodson and Du Bois are doing is so incredibly important because it forms the foundation of how Black children can be taught about this in a different way. What's interesting to me is in Du Bois' book, Black Reconstruction, his last chapter is called The Propaganda of History, which indicates to me that he knew the importance of narrative and how imperative it is to take control of it. What do you think he was witnessing in the moment or even envisioned as the narrative shifted around him? Right. I mean, that chapter is so incredible. I always tell my students, historians don't write like that anymore in this really direct way where they call people out. I mean, he's calling out historians, you know, white mainstream historians for what he says is the damage that they're doing, the actual damage that this isn't history,

this is propaganda that you're writing, that you're creating a propagandic narrative around what Reconstruction was to serve purposes around how Black people are treated today. He says, I'm not just going to write a book about Reconstruction. I'm going to tell you how other people have completely twisted this narrative for particular political and social purposes. And historians have been at the forefront of this. One of the consequences of this lost cause narrative that we are still arguing over today are Confederate monuments. But even as far back as 1935, Du Bois understood the power of statues, and he wrote about the irony of one Confederate monument in North Carolina that had a plaque celebrating that they died fighting for liberty.

Many times, these slogans are reductions, and liberty is a word that can be jam-packed with all sorts of different meaning. What do you think was meant by that phrase? What is liberty in this instance, And how is that perhaps an example of this lost cause narrative? Yeah, I mean, liberty in that instance was to continue to perpetrate the system of slavery and the racial hierarchy of the South. For me, right, I think for African Americans who look at this, they knew the war for them was about freedom from the jump. No matter what the northern government said, it was like this is about freedom. And the most explicit, obvious sense freedom, like freedom, bodily autonomy, no longer enslaved, etc.

So there is just a sense of a crazy like irony to see that on a Confederate monument and the legacy of what these monuments mean. They'll tell you that they're commemorating lost dead people who were lost or whatever, but that's just not it because there's all kinds of political messaging that's tied into these things as well. Speaking of statues, there was one recently unveiled in South Carolina in 2014 of Denmark Vesey. Who is he? So Denmark Vesey was a free Black man who was formerly enslaved from Charleston, South Carolina. He was originally probably born in the Virgin Islands, we believe.

Charleston is a major port to slavery. And it's like the estimates vary by here, 30 to 40 percent of enslaved people at certain points in this nation came in through Charleston's port. Denmark Vesey bought his freedom, but portions of his family were enslaved. And we believe this is part of what radicalized him, with a few co-conspirators who were enslaved men. The plan was eventually betrayed and Vesey was captured and executed alongside several of his co-conspirators. The statue erected there, you know, was a sort of long battle over the memory of Vesey. Vesey's memory alongside many people who had led slave revolts like Nat Turner and other folks had been part of this pantheon of a really sort of Black radical memory of enslavement where Black

people were fighting to emancipate themselves. And I think this is why Vesey's memory is so important during the Civil War and Reconstruction, because when Black people are dealing with so much violence during Reconstruction, and of course we see this in the series as well, is that Black self-defense is so important to them. We see Vesey's memory throughout time as part of this sort of pantheon of Black heroes. So there is a very strong sort of like Black militant history that I think Vesey also represents for people who are looking to that past of Black self-emancipation being central to a positive story where Black people can play a proactive role in their own freedom.

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Buy it now. Stream free on Freeview and Prime Video. Many of these Confederate monuments that still stand today were erected in the late 19th and 20th century during the rise of the Jim Crow era of segregation. But they informed the public narrative about the Confederacy and what the Civil War was supposedly fought for. How do you think this lost cause narrative that these monuments supported informed the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1960s? Well, I think that African Americans in a civil rights movement are still really fighting against some of those narratives, right? I mean, the aftermath of Reconstruction means the laws that people are fighting against, the Jim Crow laws, the voting

disenfranchisement laws. This is when we get grandfather clauses. This is when we get the laws restricting people's voting based on, you know, literacy tests. This is also where we get explicit state constitutions declaring certain public accommodations are going to be segregated. This happens mostly in the 1880s and 1890s, right after Reconstruction. All of this is based in this ideology that Black people are not capable of governing themselves. And when we get to the civil rights movement, people are still fighting against this idea. They are fighting to actually regain rights that they had in Reconstruction. And you hear many civil rights leaders say this. One of MLK's speeches, he says,

we had more Black men in Congress and Georgia during Reconstruction than we do today. And this is an obvious fact for anybody who's seen how many Black politicians are in Congress and in state houses during Reconstruction. And then you look at the 1950s and 60s, right? But it's crazy. A hundred years later, you've gone back in time. And this is what MLK is drawing attention to this in his speeches and Black activists are saying, we went backwards over see literally Black people are murdered while trying to register to vote in the 1950s and the 60s in the South. This happens all throughout the Jim Crow era. But of course, it ticks up again in this very volatile moment of activism, like it did during the Reconstruction era. You mentioned that Martin Luther King Jr. pointed to some of the gains of the Reconstruction period as the goals of the Civil Rights era. I wonder, too, if they also looked back to some of the figures of the Reconstruction era

as maybe heroes or inspirational figures. You know, I think so. I think more when you look at some of the really local movements of the Civil Rights movement, you see that more often. I think the national like the national history of the civil rights movement, we forget that a bit. But in some of the local stories, it's really important for these local communities to date back to the Reconstruction era because this is a really militant activist era. So in places like Lowndes County, Alabama, they have this militant history of armed self-defense that dates back to Reconstruction. And they lean on that history quite heavily

during the Civil Rights Movement. And it's the same for these local communities in Mississippi and South Carolina and all these places because they have this really specific local knowledge. Well, this event happened in 1874. And we know this. This is also part of this kind of community collective memory. And you see this in the way that people describe the long history of the places that they're from. I mean, you think it's 1950s, 1960s, stuff happened in the 1870s. there potentially could be people that are alive, you know, that actually witnessed some of these things. I mean, it's not actually that long ago.

There may be elderly people who were children who had their time that witnessed it, or at least they had parents who witnessed it. So these stories would not have been that far apart. You've called Reconstruction a hinge moment for the United States, and I think it's perhaps important that we understand why, especially in light of the kind of disappearance of Reconstruction from the national memory writ large. What was the hinge moment? I mean, it's a hinge moment, I think, because so much could have been different. I mean, nothing was inevitable about Reconstruction ending when it did. Nothing's inevitable about history ever is what I always tell my students,

but definitely nothing was inevitable about Reconstruction ending when it did. Things could have gone further. There was hope for Black people for land redistribution, for example, which was extremely limited, the infamous short 40 acres field order. Instead, what they got was exploitative contracts for most Black people. And this locked a lot of people into poverty for many decades. Some were able to gather together enough money to buy land, some were not. There was probably more, of course, to be done to protect Black people from all the violence that was waged against them. You know, it was a time when politicians decided that they were going to turn away from doing more. This was a deliberate

decision. Nobody was pushing them in this direction. You know, public opinion change, public opinion often changes. Politicians, some of them who had previously supported some of the strongest legislation around Reconstruction, did decide that tides were turning. There was no longer an important political priority. But for African Americans, it wasn't just a political priority. It was really livelihood and survival for many people. The ability to continue to participate in American democracy in a meaningful way, literal survival in a sense of people's lives were on the line. And at that moment, the nation decides, well, we're done. I was thinking the other day about how MLK said in his letter from the Birmingham jail

that time is neutral. Time doesn't actually necessarily progress anything. Just that time passing doesn't mean things will get better. In fact, it did not get better. It got worse. For Southerners, it was an important moment for them because it was a moment of, of course, redemption, right? It was a moment where they could actually take back some of what they thought that they had lost in the Civil War. And that moment shapes, I would say,

so much of America's future going forward because, you know, so much of the Jim Crow laws that then get established, and then we also get all the structural, like, racist laws that aren't just in the South, laws around housing, around jobs, around policing, etc., that bleed out from Jim Crow. Things would look very differently, I think, if the U.S. had stayed with Reconstruction even for another 10, 15, or 20 years. We've been discussing how Reconstruction is taught through propaganda or not at all. How do you teach Reconstruction to your students? Well, I mean, I spent quite a bit of time on Reconstruction. And actually, I start with this letter from Jordan Anderson to his former master. His former master wants him back. His

former owner wants him back, right? Slaveholder who owns him in Tennessee wants him back because he needs labor at his plantation. And he writes this really sarcastic letter, which for a long time people didn't think was real. He's currently living in Dayton, Ohio. And he's like, oh, yeah, you know, I'll come back. But you're going to have to pay me these wages. I've calculated all my back pay. And he's also like, who's going to protect my daughters from the violence that's waged against Black women? My wife is respected here. My children go to school here. Also, you tried to shoot me. Like, there's all these elements of this letter, right, that you get. And I had to read this because I was like, this is the feeling of a lot of Black people at the beginning of Reconstruction. These are the elements of what they want and need. So I asked my students, I said, what do people transitioning to freedom need? And they'll yell out things. They'll say housing. They'll say clothes. They'll say jobs. They'll say health. They'll say all these things, the basic needs of people. And I say, okay, how are they going to get it? So then we have this whole conversation about like,

what is actually given and what's aided and whatsoever to Black people during this time? And what is it? What does labor look like? What does health look like? What does family structure look like? I go through all the elements of it because I think it's so important to look at like how immensely uprooting this situation is for Black free people on top of like the immense structural changes going on in the nation. This nation is recovering from an immense violent war. But for Black people who are transitioning from slavery to freedom, it's like, okay, you're in an unfree labor system and now you have to sometimes reunite with your family. Maybe you were married during slavery. Maybe you weren't. You have to figure that out.

Maybe you have to figure out a job situation. Maybe figure where you're going to live. All these things. And I said, that's what's most important to understand is that a government structure that's not set up actually to deal with this with four million people was never going to fully secede. Security being one of the paramount things of this, right? A secure nation for free Black people to live in. So we get into all of it when we get into it in my class. And I think students really enjoy seeing all of the aspects of how complicated this time period is. That's what I really want them to get is that it is a complicated time period and that it ends really abruptly. For me, I think the failure of Reconstruction

is the most disappointing moment in American history. And that's borne out because we have continued to fail to address questions that Reconstruction almost answered for the next 100, 150 years. I'm wondering through your study and through your interaction with your students, that Reconstruction almost answered for the next 100, 150 years. I'm wondering, through your study and through your interaction with your students and the evolving, albeit slowly, conversation about Confederate monuments or even the new civil rights movement, if it could be characterized that way, arising out of the murder of George Floyd and others,

is there any hope that things are actually headed in the right direction? I feel most optimistic around my students because I think students are very hungry to know things. They tell me they have not learned much about Reconstruction. This is like 100, 170-something years, right? They didn't learn anything about reconstruction or even like this early Jim Crow period. So I'm hopeful because when I see them kind of learn about this time period, they start to put things together. Students putting together the steps of how we get from point A in the past to point B in the present, is really good. I'm hopeful that with monuments, we'll see more come down. You know, you step forward and you still realize how much work you could do.

I know it's exhausting, but like I said, when I do deal with my students and I see them put it together and I see them eager to actually change things, it does make me feel hopeful. It does. Well, Ashley Lauren Sanders, thank you so much for joining us today on American me feel hopeful. It does. Yeah. Well, Ashley Lawrence Sanders, thank you so much for joining us today on American History Tellers. Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with Professor Ashley Lawrence Sanders, author of the forthcoming book, They Knew What the War Was About, African Americans and the Memory of the Civil War. From Wondery, this is our seventh and final episode of Reconstruction from American History Tellers. In our next season, as the Supreme Court makes headlines for several controversial and surprising rulings, we're bringing you a special encore presentation of our series on Supreme Court landmark decisions,

from Marbury v. Madison to Roe v. Wade. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. is Peter Arcuni. Coordinating producers are Desi Blaylock and Christian Banas. Managing producer, Matt Gant. Senior managing producer, Ryan Moore. Senior producer, Andy Herman. And executive producers, Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marsha Louis for Wondery.

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