Why Don't We Learn About Reconstruction? White Women and the Lost Cause

Send us Fan MailKaren takes Jonelle through the Reconstruction era, the 12-year window after the Civil War when 2,000 Black Americans were elected to office, 400+ Black towns took root, and the Black-to-white wealth gap collapsed from 60:1 to 10:1 in just over a decade. Then she names the forces that buried it: Andrew Johnson's pardons, the reversal of 40 acres and a mule, the Dunning School narrative that trained history teachers into the 1970s, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the white Christian women who successfully lobbied Lost Cause textbooks into southern public schools as late as 1980. The through-line that makes this episode land: historians are calling the current rollback of civil rights the largest dismantling since Reconstruction. 591 books by Black authors banned from Pentagon schools. 3.4 billion in HBCU grants frozen. Arlington's Reconstruction pages quietly removed. Karen and Jonelle connect the dots between what was taken from Black communities in 1877 and what is being taken right now, and they make a case for why white women in particular need to know this history, because white women were central to erasing it the first time.CALLS TO ACTIONThis week, ask yourself what you actually learned about Reconstruction in school. If the answer is nothing or a myth, pick one source from our show notes and spend 30 minutes filling that gap.Notice one moment this week where you, or someone around you, makes a snap judgment about who belongs in a space and who is serving it. Sit in the discomfort of the assumption rather than skipping past it.Find one Black-led Reconstruction historian to follow or read this month. Kidada E. Williams, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the Equal Justice Initiative's Reconstruction in America report are starting points.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at [email protected] the show