Petition to School Boards to Teach Reconstruction

Reconstruction was the pivotal moment when America could have achieved racial justice. America failed the test when Southern racists and northern capitalists abandoned the freedmen. We have suffered the consequences till this day. By understanding Reconstruction we can finally surmount four centuries of white supremacy and honor America's rhetorical credo that all men (and women) are created equal. Every child in this nation should read at least parts of Du Bois' Black Reconstruction.

Students who have not learned America's history often repeat the mistakes of the past.

Students need to see their lives and the lives of their peers in the curriculum, in their classrooms. And given what is happening today ... all the more pressing.

Children have a strong sense of justice, and if they can be presented with the facts about the Reconstruction Era they can better choose for themselves to stand against the racial injustices of today, before society's more regressive tendencies can shape then to the contrary.

The topic of Reconstruction represents the "Second Founding" of our country, as historian Eric Foner argues. It is also arguably the least taught or most poorly and falsely taught period in US history, often caricatured as a failure as the result of Black Americans and Abolitionists, when in reality, this period both shows the successes of Black Americans to carve out their own lives in the face of growing terror, lynching, Jim Crow segregationist laws, and neo-slavery (from Douglass Blackmon), i.e., the human trafficking of African Americans up until World War II, and even later. The work of a new generation of African American leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells in response to this oppression laid the groundwork for the modern civil rights movement. So I teach to this history more in my classrooms in order to support students of color and white allies seeking historical role models and Constitutional precedents for fighting injustice today, and would urge more schools to teach a revised and truthful version of Reconstruction to more students in the future.

Because it demonstrates how a country Gets together it can change things for the better and benefit a lot of people

Current racial relations are grounded in misinformation, lack of information - all which lead to a deficit in understanding how we got here today. I was taught that 'slaves were free' and there were 'carpetbaggers' - period. I have aimed in the past 2 decades to find out what I didn't know - "White Rage" by Dr. Carol Anderson and "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson have been foundational in my learning. We need to have this conversation EVERYWHERE - blue states, red states --- ALL states.

Reconstruction was a moment of opportunity to create a truly inclusive democracy. The opportunity was squandered in the interest of "unity" which served only to pacify and fortify forces of white supremacy--the very forces that seek to disenfranchise non-white and poor Americans today. We must acknowledge and teach this history. We are still living it today.

The Reconstruction era was the start of former enslaved Africans and African Americans being considered equal to white Americans, but it was a dream deferred because white slaveholders did not want to give up their Black free labor. All children must learn how the construct of de facto and systemic racism came to be in the USA so that they can play a role in dismantling racism that leads to discrimination and inequality in in this country.

If we don't know the truth of what got us here, we can't move forward effectively.

Unless students of all ages understand the foundational impact of slavery and racism in this country, we cannot begin to make progress in racial healing.