“Reconstruction: Freedom’s Promise, Freedom’s Betrayal”

Reconstruction promised a new birth of freedom—and then slammed the door. In this episode, we trace that “brief moment in the sun,” from emancipation, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the battle over land and labor to Lincoln’s lenient Ten Percent Plan, Johnson’s racist “Restoration,” and the rise of Black Codes. We follow Radical Reconstruction, Black political power, public schools, and sharecropping’s trap, then turn to Grant, the fight against the Klan, and the violent “Redemption” that culminates in the Compromise of 1877. Along the way, we ask Du Bois’s question: was Reconstruction doomed, or was it abandoned?