Allison Keyes, a well-known former NPR correspondent, has an interesting article in Smithsonian Magazine of the new Reconstruction Era exhibit “Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Here are a few excerpts from the article:
In the museum’s 4,300-square-foot special exhibition gallery, the show features more than 175 objects, 14 media programs and 300 images. In the aftermath of the Civil War, during the Reconstruction Era, more than four million newly freed Black Americans sought fulfillment of the promises laid out in the U.S. Constitution, including everything from the right to vote, to own land and to raise their families safely. It was a period, too, when white Americans responded with deadly violence ranging from lynching to voter intimidation and unlawful incarceration.
Museum curator Paul Gardullo says that the Reconstruction Era needs to be reclaimed from myth, ignorance and occlusion. “There has been a willful misreading of the history of our nation that demeans, dehumanizes and decenters African Americans from the narrative of freedom and making America into a place that its founding documents promised and continue to promise that it will be,” Gardullo says.
He explains that the museum wants to shine a light on the visions of freedom that millions of African Americans shared, and helped bring into being in the decades following the Civil War. Gardullo believes those visions reshaped far more than just the nation’s politics.
“Those visions of freedom had to do with questions of land and labor, questions of community building, issues of civil rights and human rights,” Gardullo says, adding that the African American community provided a model for the struggles other communities faced throughout the 20th and 21st century.
Gardullo says Reconstruction is both a historic period, and an unfinished process that is bent on making America a more equitable and just nation. He notes that many who worked within the civil rights movement refer to that era as a “Second Reconstruction,” and others consider the present moment to be a third.
The battle for freedom has been fundamental to the African American community long before the Civil War, and Gardullo thinks of the word reconstruction as defining what he calls the fight for “full freedom.”
…Gardullo and Kinshasha Holman Conwill, the museum’s deputy director, coedited a companion volume, Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and Its Legacies. The book—with a foreword by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner, a preface by historian and former museum director Spencer Crew, and essays from leading scholars including Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw—examines the legacies of Reconstruction that continue to affect modern society. It also tells stories of the Black men and women, like Frederick Douglass and Hiram Rhodes Revels, who helped to reshape a nation.
“The shadow of Reconstruction is a long shadow, and if we want to look at the ways in which that shadow is evidence, [look at] the Black freedom struggle, which began with the first time an African tried to be free, the first time someone defined him or herself by their personhood and not by their status as a shadow, and that reaches all the way across enslavement, the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the current period that we’re in,” Conwill says.
“Americans have created so many falsehoods about Reconstruction that it is hard to blame them for not recognizing the truth, i.e., the idea of Black people enjoying American freedom so offended white nationalists they overthrew Reconstruction by waging war on them and it,” Williams writes.
Conwill thinks both liberation and violence are deeply grounded in the bedrock of this nation.
“Violence is one of the ways that the powerful, in this case white supremacists, exercise and execute their will over other people, and so the Ku Klux Klan and the other racist organizations were able to do what they did. That is terrorize Black communities because they threatened Black communities with death and with all manner of horrors, and the destruction of whole communities,” Conwill says. She cites the example of the 2015 massacre at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshippers.
…The essay by NMAAHC curator Mary Elliott “Legacies of Place,” centers on a slave cabin from Edisto Island in South Carolina that is now a centerpiece of the museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Slavery and Freedom.”
The tiny 16- by 20-foot cabin, built in the 1850s on what was known as “slave street” on the Point of Pines plantation, illustrates that battle for post-enslavement land.
Conwill notes that before and after the Civil War the cabin housed generations of Black people.
“Now it is a sacred building. It is a building that echoes with the lives of Black people,” she explains.
“The site where it stood is a part of this country where mostly Black and white family members are still trying to wrestle with the multiracial legacy of descendants, of those who were owned and those who owned other human beings. Those conversations are fraught, they are highly imperfect, but they are part of that desire to look at the arc of the moral universe that is bending toward justice.”
“Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies” is on view through August 21, 2022 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Feature Image: A cabin, built in the 1850s on what was known as “slave street” on the Point of Pines plantation in South Carolina.
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