Reconstruction

I was taught that Reconstruction in the American South was a negative American experience.  Two terms we learned in grade school were “carpetbaggers” (Northerners who came south to exploit the whites) and “scalawags,” Southerners who turned on their fellow whites for personal profit.  We did not learn about the thousands of lynchings, the mistreatment of blacks after Northern troops were withdrawn, or the day-to-day horror of a system based on racial superiority.

We were not taught about the thousands of idealistic northerners who traveled south to teach former slaves.  We were not told about the “black codes,” passed in some states after the war that said “all of the regulations that applied to slaves now apply to freed negroes.”  The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were glossed over.  The contributions of blacks to the northern victory in the Civil War were not mentioned.  I didn’t even know the Union Army had black troops until I was in college, and even then it wasn’t emphasized.

From the time Federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877 until the Civil Rights movement, life for Southern black men and women was a decades-long descent into bigotry and hate.  

The National Park Service runs 408 sites nationwide.  In the last two decades many of those sites have been incorporating new information on slavery and its role in American history.  Of those 408 sites, however, not one is devoted exclusively to the activities of Reconstruction.  We celebrate Martin Luther King day, but we still aren’t quite there yet, are we?