A vital, valuable and relevant examination of Reconstruction

“Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and its Legacies” edited by Kinshasha Holman Conwill and Paul Gardullo (Harpercollins)

Historians today talk about a “Long Nineteenth Century” to emphasize the lengthy and pervasive influence of Jim Crow discrimination in voting, housing, education, public services and all aspects of life in the South, as well as the accompanying violence and intimidation meted out by white supremacists from Reconstruction until well into the 1960s.

These same historians have produced an outpouring of books and articles recently about Reconstruction, that brief decade or so after the end of the Civil War during which African Americans attempted to exercise full citizenship rights guaranteed them by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, as well as major civil rights bills. No history of Reconstruction would be complete without an accounting of the seemingly interminable white backlash that transpired subsequent to Reconstruction.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture, the newest addition to the grand Smithsonian complex on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is currently featuring an exhibit entitled “Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and its Legacies” through Aug. 21, 2022. The accompanying exhibit catalog by the same title is an excellent single-volume introduction for general readers and aspiring historians to Reconstruction and the “Long Nineteenth Century.”

The exhibit catalog contains incisive, readable essays by leading scholars; telling photographs and etchings from the period; reproductions of documents; an index, and a bibliography of sources.

Of special interest to local readers may be the succinct account of the abortive effort – often referred to as “40 acres and a mule” – that promised for a moment in early 1865 an economic basis for self-sufficiency among the formerly enslaved in coastal Georgia and Florida. Imagine: a strip of land from the coast to 30 miles inland, from the South Carolina border to St. Johns County, Fla., distributed in small plots to those who had tilled this land for centuries under imminent threat of physical and sexual violence.

Little wonder that decades later in 1900, Jacksonville’s most famous native sons, James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson, would pen this lyric: “Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died.”