America@250: How We Remember History
If you grew up in the United States, do you remember learning in primary or secondary school about a period directly after the Civil War in the mid-1800s when there were Black senators and congressmen in the House of Representatives such as the men posed in this blog’s headline image? You know, those pictures showing the abolition of slavery when newly freed enslaved Black people received land and more than 2,000 Black office holders served at every level of America’s political system? That includes in 1870, Hiram Revels, who became the first African American in the U.S. Congress when he was elected to represent Mississippi in the Senate. Remember that? No?
That’s likely because you were never taught it to begin with.
If you did learn it, probably you sought out the history as an adult.
“The Shackle Broken—By the Genius of Freedom”: commemorating 1874 civil rights speech delivered by
Congressman Robert B. Elliott of South Carolina. (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
This multiracial governance happened during a period called Reconstruction, from 1865-1877. The historic period in which the United States grappled with the question of how to integrate millions of newly freed African Americans into social, political, and labor systems. It was a time of significant transformation.
During Reconstruction, Congress passed three constitutional amendments – Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth – that permanently abolished slavery, defined birthright citizenship and guaranteed due process and equal protection under the law and granted all males the ability to vote by prohibiting voter discrimination based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. African Americans across the United States faced steep obstacles of resistance as they attempted to claim their newly won rights.
Despite the significance of Reconstruction – historians often call it the country’s “Second Founding” – many Americans know little about it.
That’s intentional. As is the erasure of history happening today.
If you do know the history of Reconstruction, the most common way taught in high school is that it was a failure. As in, “we tried to let Black people govern and they didn’t know how to do it.”
Also, not true.
Historian Kate Masur said in a 2022 interview, “teaching American history has always been political. Teaching Reconstruction has been one of the more political or ‘controversial’ periods of American history, because it was a [time] in which a dramatic new experiment in interracial, multiracial democracy was undertaken and a lot of people didn’t like that. There were battles not only on the ground about what to do in that moment but also about how to remember it: was this a period that was horrendous for the United States, as many White segregationists wanted us to believe, or was this a period that was actually very heroic on the part of a lot of people that was tragically cut short.”
Reconstruction is just one of many historical examples of what historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson calls this White House administration’s “full throated attack on American history.”
In one of her “This Week in Politics” videos, she says, the current White House administration holds “The idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. And those few people tend to be White and male, and they are more qualified than Black Americans, Brown Americans, People of Color and women are to have a say in their society and to determine their own fate. And that is what the administration is trying to do with its attacks on US history.”
Richardson continues, “When scholars of Black American history talk about how Black history is American history, what they’re saying is that the central theme of Black history, and I would add women’s history and any marginalized history, is really the central theme of American history…Democracy in the United States has always been the effort of those people who were excluded from it to be included. So, we understand attacks on our rights. We understand how hard it is to protect those rights. We understand creating movements of solidarity to expand those rights.”
The Power of Storytelling
Demonizing Black and Brown people serves a purpose. It creates a racial wedge to discourage a multiracial coalition of Americans who have more in common economically with one another than they do with the oligarchs who attempt to discourage their alliances.
If you are attempting to remove the economic, social and political rights of Black and Brown people you have to justify those actions with a story – that the Black and Brown people who fought for a more democratic United States don’t matter. So, it’s okay that the federal government is taking away their rights. It’s okay to exclude them from economic opportunities.
For centuries, elites have used storytelling to justify theft, exclusion and exploitation to amass wealth and power to the detriment of Black and Brown people.
Progress Can Be Erased When Collective Memory is Intentionally Erased
So let us remember, using basic math:
Slavery began in 1619 and was abolished in 1865. That’s 246 years.
Reconstruction is from 1865 to 1877. It lasts only 12 years. Because the federal and state governments refused to enforce Civil Rights Acts that were passed in the 1860s – the 14th amendment, and the 15th amendment. It’s as if those laws did not exist. So Black people were not protected by them.
As a result, what followed was the segregation and disenfranchisement borne from Black Code laws also known as “Jim Crow” which represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid and lasted for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era (starting around 1865) until the mid-1960s.
This system of racial segregation that violently enforced these laws (“Jim Crow”) was dismantled by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The entire civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s was fought to vindicate rights that Black people had already won following the end of slavery in the 1860s during Reconstruction.
The civil rights movement as we think of it in modern times actually began right after WWI ended in 1918 when Black American veterans returned home after fighting fascism overseas, anticipating the dignity and respect earned during military service. Instead, they faced intensified racial tensions in their domestic lives. The influx of returning men meant competition for shrinking economic opportunities in postwar America leading to the “Red Summer” of 1919 when racist violence broke out in at least 26 cities. The civil rights movement that is being dismantled in mere months in 2025 was fought for 46 years, from 1918 to 1964.
So, in the United States, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act of 1964, 1965 and 1968, respectively, democracy has only existed for 60 years. Slavery and codified systems of discrimination based on skin color have existed for nearly 350 years. This, for a country that is looking to celebrate 250 years of “democracy” in 2026.
In 2025, 160 years after the 13th amendment abolishes slavery, the White House administration implemented a swift campaign of erasing the full American history that tells the story of the central role of enslaved Africans in America’s economic global dominance.
Wealth distributed among a small group in the United States is a direct outcome of a business model that evolved into a codified system of racial apartheid known as “Jim Crow” that lasted for nearly 100 years from 1865 (abolishment of slavery) to the passing of the Civil Rights act of 1964, which is now abolished.
Why?
Because it will ensure that wealth continues to flow into the coffers of all those who have for generations benefited directly or indirectly – banking, insurance, real estate, colleges and universities, healthcare, politics, agriculture, transportation, government and more – and still do today.
