Image: Black legislators during the Reconstruction Era.

Highlighted Resources

W.E.B. Du Bois: chapter 1 of Black Reconstruction.

Facing History and Ourselves:

• The Reconstruction Era and the Fragility of Democracy.
• Black Officeholders in the South.

Eric Foner: collection of articles from the leading scholar of Reconstruction.

Martin Luther King: Dr. Martin Luther King on Reconstruction.

Teach Reconstruction Report:

• Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction.
• Collection of podcasts, digital archives, and readings on Reconstruction for children and teenagers.

Bernie Sanders, with Cornell West, Eric Foner, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Lessons of Reconstruction: A Panel Discussion.

The Zinn Education Project: Resources for Teaching Reconstruction.

Books

William A. Blair: The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction.

W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.

Kinshasha Holman Conwill & Paul Gardullo: Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and Its Legacies.

Eric Foner:

• Reconstruction Updated Edition: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.
• The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.
• Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction.

Douglas R. Egerton: The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era.

Adam Fairclough:

• Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876.
• The Revolution that Failed: Reconstruction in Natchitoches.

Hilary Green: Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890.

Robert S. Levine: The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson.

Articles  

Karen Cook Bell: Local Politics and Black Freedom After the Civil War.

William A. Blair: Recovering a Forgotten Massacre of Black People in Reconstruction.

Robert Bland: Muhammad Ali, Freedom Road, and the Legacy of Reconstruction.

Lorraine Boissoneault:

• The Deadliest Massacre in Reconstruction-Era Louisiana Happened 150 Years Ago: In September 1868, Southern white Democrats hunted down around 200 African-Americans in an effort to suppress voter turnout.
• The Political Cartoon That Explains the Battle Over Reconstruction: Take a deep dive into this drawing by famed illustrator Thomas Nast.

DeNeen L. Brown: An abolitionist’s hope meets a president’s hypocrisy.

Laura Clark: The First African American Senator Was Sworn in 145 Years Ago Today: Hiram R. Revels made history when, amid the tensions of Reconstruction, he became a senator from Mississippi.

Bobby J. Donaldson: Meet Joseph Rainey, the First Black Congressman: Born enslaved, he was elected to Congress in the wake of the Civil War. But the impact of this momentous step in U.S. race relationships did not last long.

Doug Egerton: Frederick Douglass and the Periodization of Reconstruction.

Crystal N. Feimster: When Black Women Reclaimed Their Bodies: The fight for sexual justice during Reconstruction.

Eric Foner:

• Why We Need a National Monument to Reconstruction.
• There Have Been 10 Black Senators Since Emancipation: Elected 150 years ago, Hiram Revels was the first.
• Black Reconstruction: An Introduction.
• The Supreme Court and the History of Reconstruction — and Vice-Versa.
• Why Reconstruction Matters.
• Learning from the Failure of Reconstruction.
• The Lost Promise of Reconstruction.

Jordan Grant: In 1868, Black Suffrage Was on the Ballot: Every election season in the United States revolves around a set of issues—health care, foreign affairs, the economy. In 1868, at the height of the Reconstruction, the pressing issue was Black male suffrage.

Bryan Greene: Created 150 Years Ago, the Justice Department’s First Mission Was to Protect Black Rights: In the wake of the Civil War, the government’s new force sought to enshrine equality under the law.

Jessica Marie Johnson: “Yet Lives and Fights”: Riots, Resistance, and Reconstruction.

Allison Keyes: America Is Still Reckoning With the Failures of Reconstruction.

Danny Lewis: The 1873 Colfax Massacre Crippled the Reconstruction Era: One of the worst incidents of racial violence after the Civil War set the stage for segregation.

Alexander Manevitz: The failures of Reconstruction have never been more evident — or relevant — than today: Americans’ failure to secure genuine racial equality after the Civil War continues to haunt us.

Nora McGreevy: Newly Digitized Freedmen’s Bureau Records Help Black Americans Trace Their Ancestry: Genealogists, historians and researchers can now peruse more than 3.5 million documents from the Reconstruction-era agency.

Keri Leigh Merritt:

• Race, Reconstruction, and Reparations.
• Aaron Alpeoria Bradley and Black Power during Reconstruction.
• A Dual Emancipation: How Black Freedom Benefited Poor Whites.

Guy Emerson Mount: When Slaves Go on Strike: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction 80 Years Later.

Alexandra E. Stern: The Reconstruction Origins of Black Wall Street.