RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

Gates Jr.

: Twelve years after the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction was dealt a devastating blow.

You might even say it was overthrown, as Southern Democrats took their states back, one by one.

Foner: The 1880s is a kind of a twilight zone between Reconstruction and the full implementation of the Jim Crow system.

Black people continued to vote in many parts of the South.

There was still violence against them, but there were still some black people holding office in many parts of the South.

Civil rights laws remained on the books.

Gates Jr.

: One of the cruel ironies of Reconstruction is that black people could claim certain rights in the 1870s, that they would have to fight to reclaim in the 1960s.

Thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, African Americans were guaranteed equal access to hotels, restaurants, theaters, and public transportation.

Those who were denied service could expect their rights to be upheld in a court of law.

But all that was about to change.

Ida B. Wells, a child of slavery and Reconstruction, taught in a segregated school outside Memphis, Tennessee.

Being denied access to the all-white, first-class car on a railroad trip would propel her to the front lines of civil rights activism.

Wells: One day while riding back to my school, I took a seat in the ladies' coach of the train as usual.

The conductor came along to collect tickets.

He told me I would have to go in the other car.

I refused.

He tried to drag me out of the seat.

I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand.

He got the baggage man to help him, and they succeeded in dragging me out.

White ladies and gentleman stood on the seats applauding the conductor for his brave stand.

Hannah-Jones: She challenges segregation on public transportation decades before we would ever hear the name Rosa Parks.

Bay: She sued.

She won in the lower courts.

But the railroad appealed the decision, and when the court case went to the Tennessee State Supreme Court Ida B. Wells lost.

Gates Jr.

: W.E.B.

Du Bois summarized Reconstruction in one sentence, "The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, and then moved back again, towards slavery."

Yet, African Americans had tasted freedom.

They had begun to acquire land, build schools, and create social institutions of their own.

And though the tide was turning, they refused to give up on the promise of Reconstruction.

After the defeat of the Confederacy, many white Southerners still longed for ways to hold on to their civilization.

And even when they tried to convince the rest of the country that they accepted the outcome of the war, their vision of the future looked disturbingly similar to the past.

The chief evangelist of this new order was Henry Grady, an enterprising newspaper editor from Atlanta.

And in late 1886, he journeyed to New York City to outline his vision of what he called the "New South."

Hahn: So much of the country saw the South as this kind of benighted, you know, section that had endured Civil War, that had been impoverished, that was beset by political turmoil and racial violence.

Henry Grady traveled the country.

He went to the northeast trying to sell his vision of a different kind of South, one that was more modern, one that was more economically diversified, one that could attract Northern investment, one that would see economic growth, and one in which the tensions and conflicts of Reconstruction would be put aside.

Gates Jr.

: But Grady's rosy description of how the South had "solved" the Negro problem ignored the dangerous reality that black people faced.

When it came to the possibilities of owning land or earning a living, the New South looked quite a lot like the old South.

Hunter: What African Americans want most is to own land, and some of them are able to access land, but by no means as many people as would desire land.

Sharecropping emerges starting around the late 1860s going into the 1870s, but it really doesn't become predominant until around 1880.

African Americans are given access to plots of land, typically 30- to 50-acre plots, which they essentially control.

They don't own the land, but they work the land as a family unit.

But there are a lot of things about sharecropping that become quite oppressive.

Ali: You would live on somebody's land and you would give over a share of your crop as rent.

But the way that it worked is that people became increasingly in debt because there was always interest on whatever you were using, whether it was tools, or seeds, or the use of animals.

Hunter: There are yearly contracts that they have to sign.

Most African Americans are not literates.

They're not quite sure exactly what they're signing onto.

They're signing away many aspects of their independence.

Ali: Many of the sharecroppers worked on the same plantations that they were in as slaves.

Many of them do become more impoverished over this period of time.

Gates Jr.

: Sharecropping wasn't even the worst of it.

In a region still scarred by war and economic dislocation, the labor system that took shape in the late 19th century developed coercive means to ensure that cotton remained king.

It was called convict leasing.

Get arrested on a minor charge or a trumped-up charge, you could find yourself locked up and then hired out to a planter or even a corporation, bidding on inmate labor.

The pipeline from prisons to profits in this country has deep roots.

Williams: The convict lease system was a inhumane and barbaric form of punishment, really emphasizing that African Americans were not afforded equal opportunity before the law.

The convict lease system was in effect a form of slavery.

Crenshaw: Black women were also part of convict leasing and were often incarcerated alongside men.

They were subject to sexual abuse and assault.

Muhammad: Convict leasing used the criminal justice system to discipline the black community to be subservient to the economic interest of white, Southern elites, and they were snatching up bodies everywhere to fuel the system.

Gates Jr.

: After Reconstruction ended, African Americans in the South faced a stark choice -- stay and live in oppressive conditions or find a way out.

They sought a place where they could support their families, safe from violence and oppression.

For many, that promised land was Kansas.

Dray: In Kansas you could live free.

You were free from the sort of plantation system, free from the denial of one's equal rights as well as night rider terrorism.

Gates Jr.

: In 1879 an estimated six thousand so-called exodusters left the South for Kansas.

Within a few years, thousands more would uproot and move west.

Painter: It's the first large migration of black people, and so it attracted attention because these were people who were moving of their own volition.

Blight: They were leaving virulent racism.

They were leaving dead-end sharecropping.

Painter: Most black Southerners thought of themselves as Christians.

They identified with the Bible of Exodus, and they felt that they were being delivered into a promised land, or at least a safer land.

Man: Oppressed so hard they could not stand Group: Let my people go Blight: It became like a political test question among black leadership of how a lot of black folk in the South saw Reconstruction and had no hope in federal intervention to help them anymore.

And they were looking for any possibility.

Dray: It had its opposition in some very familiar figures, mainly Frederick Douglass, Blanche K. Bruce, Robert Brown Elliott, who were black Congressmen.

They were very wedded to the kind of Lincoln-esque view of America.

They believed in the Constitution.

They believed in the Reconstruction amendments, and to them, the idea of turning your back on that instead of standing and trying to stay and fight for one's rights was inimical to them.

Gates Jr.

: While nowhere near as massive in scale as the Great Migration that would come a few decades later, the exoduster movement was large enough that it caught the attention of politicians in Washington, who demanded to know what was going on and why.

Painter: The Senate hearings were important.

We can learn a lot about the conditions of life because of the testimony.

Adams: We found ourselves in such a condition that there was no way on Earth that we could better our conditions there.

We appeal to the president of the United States and to Congress to help us out of our distress or protect us in our rights and privileges.

Blight: It turns out a lot of people who went to Kansas didn't exactly find Shangri-La.

They didn't find a greater deal in most cases.

They did not become landowners by the large measure.

But it was one of those moments again that tested everybody.

Gates Jr.

: Even when African Americans moved out of the South, they soon discovered that they couldn't outrun Jim Crow.

In 1875, they'd seen a glimmer of hope with the passage of a civil rights act that banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.

But just eight years later, the Supreme Court would strike down that law as unconstitutional.

Crenshaw: Segregation is growing, it's not receding.

And it's not just impacting those who are the former slaves, not those who are agricultural workers, not just those in the rural South, but elite African Americans everywhere.

Alexander: The Supreme Court is going to rule on a number of cases, cobbled together, which we have called the Civil Rights Cases.

Crenshaw: One of the cases came out of San Francisco, where a couple was denied the ability to sit in the dress circle of the theater.

The dress circle is the first-class seat.

We're talking about the theater in the 1870s.

This is not a movie theater, this is theater.

Foner: Most black people were concerned not to be treated in an undignified manner, not be excluded from a restaurant, not be sent to the back of a railroad car, not to be put on the outer deck, let's say, of a steamboat on the Mississippi River.

Alexander: The Supreme Court ultimately rules in 1883 that the 14th Amendment does not prevent people from denying individuals access to hotels, restaurants, because these are private locations, and they can make that decision on their own.

Bradley: When a man has emerged from slavery, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.

Crenshaw: The parting shot of Justice Bradley is an insult to all freedmen.

Less than 20 years after the end of slavery, after the end of a system that had lasted for two centuries, the Supreme Court is talking about how laws against discrimination is somehow preferential treatment.

The fact that they could pull that off meant that African Americans were utterly and totally on their own when it came to law.

Gates Jr.

: When African Americans discovered that they wouldn't be allowed to cross the color line, they turned inward and created a black world within a white world.

Williams: The possibilities of freedom have been shut down, they've been closed off.

The pathways that, you know, could potentially guarantee success for a lot of people have been blocked by either violence or by new laws that are being passed to segregate on a racial basis.

For a lot of people, they have to figure out to what degree do they try to fight the system, knowing that they or their loved ones could be killed.

Muhammad: African Americans rally their resources to begin to create communities that are safe spaces, that are places where they can control as much as possible their daily lives.

Medford: It's self-segregation.

Black people believe that if they were forced to be in the presence of white people, there would be certain things they couldn't do.

They couldn't expect to have control over politics.

They couldn't expect to have economic independence.

And they certainly would not have the social standing that they could if they had their own towns.

They had their own businesses.

They had their own churches.

They had everything that they thought they needed to live decent lives.

Gates Jr.

: All-black towns and all-black neighborhoods continued well into the twentieth century, offering a buffer between what Du Bois called, "life within the veil" and the indignities of Jim Crow America.

Medford: The owner of the local dry goods store was not in competition with the white man because they were not in his community, and we know that these clashes occur when black men are coming up against their white competitors.

Motley: Reconstruction has two motifs.

There are those who left, and there are those who stayed.

Madison Park gives evidence to those who stayed.

Gates Jr.

: Give me the history of this community.

Where are we, how did it come about?

Motley: In 1880, a group of freed slaves, nothing except the clothes on their back, some money they had saved decided to pull their resources together and to organize themselves to create community.

There was one in particular, by the name of Eli Madison, who was kind of the leader of the pack.

and Eli organized them to buy a small piece of land and to work that land and make it profitable.

And my grandfather's grandfather was one of those people who joined Eli Madison later when he established this place.

He believed that he could be in charge of his own destiny.

The uncertainties of going to another place were just as great as the uncertainties that he was going to face here.

There are far more people who stayed behind than who went away.

Gates Jr.

: Far more.

Motley: Yeah.

All the descendants of those founders were the people that were in and out of my lives daily.

I grew up in the same house, on the same piece of land that my grandfather's grandfather built.

Gates Jr.

: What positive things for a black person comes from growing up in an all-black world?

Motley: I knew that what I was being prepared to do here in this place was gonna prepare me for a larger world beyond Madison Park.

Gates Jr.

: Do we still need Madison Parks for our people?

Motley: We need Madison Park now more than ever before.

Gates Jr.

: Why?

Motley: We can create support systems that can address many of the problems and challenges that we have in society today.

Gates Jr.

: Despite the drawing of the color line, African Americans refused to remain within the confines of Jim Crow.

Looking at white farmers toiling next to their black neighbors, it was inevitable to wonder if they could transcend superficial differences of color and form alliances based on mutual economic interests.

Ayers: The post-Reconstruction South is a hard place to be a farmer.

The prices for what they're growing are steadily declining, and it's just not clear how you're supposed to make a living.

Black farmers are in the same situation as white farmers in this regard.

They need what they are growing to be worth more.

Painter: The colored farmers' alliances did represent a seeking of economic and political power on the part of black farmers.

This was a time in which black men were losing their political power.

Gates Jr.

: Organizing workers along class lines rather than racial lines was revolutionary, especially in the Jim Crow South.

The effects could have transformed the South fundamentally.

Ayers: They bring together black people and white people and they say, "We might be able to mobilize this politically."

The Republicans have walked away from black people at this point.

The Democrats seem to have walked away from poorer white people.

Ali: It was a grassroots movement, a movement of ordinary people that were trying to, in some ways, push back on the political elites, the business elites, the social elites.

Ayers: They would pool their resources and buy things cooperatively and help each other, but the alliances are struggling.

and they say, "Well, just economics isn't going to do it.

We need political power.

So what we want to do is form a people's party."

Their detractors call it populist.

And they say, "All right, we're populists."

The Democrats don't like the populists.

The Republicans don't like the populists because they're taking voters from both of them.

It's the largest third-party challenge in American history.

Brown: That's kind of redemption for us, in American history, to look back at those moments when we see those broad, participatory coalitions happening, and to think that's who we are.

We are those, those common struggles to make a better future for ourselves.

That's America, too.

Ali: Black and white people try to come together, and then they're pit against each other.

The Democratic Party, which is the party of white supremacy, had to mobilize and use everything to crush it.

They used propaganda, they used beating people up.

They used legal means.

And they created a culture where poor white people saw themselves as very different from black people.

Gates Jr.

: The 15th Amendment had removed race as a barrier to voting, and for the most part, African-American men voted Republican.

Southern Democrats, accordingly, cast about for ways to curb black voting without triggering a response from Washington.

Throughout the 1890s, Southern states held constitutional conventions, dominated by Democrats, essentially designed to strip African Americans of the right to vote.

Ayers: Constitutional conventions in the South were the lynchpins of Reconstruction.

Those were essential to pass the 14th Amendment and then to apply for readmission to the United States.

The constitutional conventions that follow twenty, twenty-five years later run the story in reverse.

They are the places where a lot of the gains of Reconstruction in politics are taken away.

Medford: They're not about democracy.

They're not about majority rules.

They're about ensuring that white Americans have control of the political process and have control of everything else that goes with that.

Gates Jr.

: Only one black delegate attended Mississippi's convention in the fall of 1890, Isaiah Montgomery.

And Isaiah would vote with the majority.

Medford: Isaiah Montgomery had been born into slavery on a plantation in Mississippi that was owned by Jefferson Davis' brother.

Montgomery was a man who was educated.

He was literate.

He had business savvy.

He certainly understood, in freedom, that black people needed an environment where they were in control.

In 1887, he decided to establish Mound Bayou that was independent of white control economically, politically, and independent of white influence socially.

In order to keep this independence, he would have to make certain concessions.

He was willing to not press for certain rights if Mound Bayou was left alone.

Montgomery: Mr.

President and gentlemen, I freely stated to my earnest conviction that the work of this convention must restrict the colored vote to a greater extent because of their inferior development.

Medford: Montgomery does what he's expected to do.

He supports the Southern cause of disenfranchisement of African Americans in Mississippi.

He makes a speech and he says to black people and white Mississippians, "We know that you have to do this, we know that if you deny us the vote that's okay because after all, we're fresh out of slavery."

Montgomery: My mission here is to bridge a chasm that has been widening and deepening for a generation.

We are all aware that our race has not yet attained the high plane of moral, intellectual, and political excellence common to yours, but it is our privilege to press on and upward.

Medford: He was reviled for it.

African Americans felt that he had betrayed the race, that he didn't need to concede so deeply, especially since that Constitution really did strip black people of any kind of political influence they had had before.

Ayers: Starting in 1890, every Southern state writes a new constitution or passes new laws that deprive black men of the vote without actually saying the phrase "race," or "Negro," or "colored."

The South goes from a time in which black and white men are voting in very large numbers to, in a very short period of time, where they are not.

We call that disfranchisement.

Gates Jr.

: Other Southern states took their cue from Mississippi.

Voter suppression tactics included literacy tests, poll taxes, and the requirement that potential voters demonstrate that they "understood" the state constitution.

Their combined effect was so successful that they depressed not just the black vote, but the poor white vote as well.

Cobb: When we're looking at this in the current context, things like voter I.D.s, the diminishing number of polling places that strategically coincide with communities where African Americans are located, it's not hard to see a connection between these things.

Gates Jr.

: The disenfranchisement of African Americans in the decades after Reconstruction didn't exist in a vacuum.

It was one manifestation of a pervasive ideology of white supremacy that presupposed that black people were biologically inferior.

From the most debased forms of popular culture, to the ivory towers of academia, the onslaught of racist theories about African Americans amounted to character assassination on a race-wide scale.

Brown: One of the things you get in periods of great inequality is a lot of legitimating discourses, which try to tell us why the inequality that we see all around us is natural, why that's the natural order of things.

Scientific racism is one of those discourses.

It's pseudoscience.

Masur: The emergence and kind of surge of this idea of the biology of race plays into the hand of these people who would like to emphasize that white people should only be with other white people, and that anything other than that is unnatural.

Brown: That's the biggest problem with scientific racism.

It's not so much that it was bad science, but there was a scientific argument that was trying to prove a social argument.

Gates Jr.

: While scientific racism became one of the many tools of Jim Crow, white supremacists took it upon themselves to police the boundaries of the color line.

They were judge, jury, and executioner, substituting "lynch law" for the legal system.

Muhammad: It's really beginning in the 1880s and by the 1890s that we see the explosion of this form of vigilante violence, of mob terror directed towards the African-American community.

[ Whip cracking ] Alexander: The overarching purpose of the violence is really control and the ability to impose white supremacy on the South and ultimately on the entire nation.

And as lynching becomes something that happens more and more in American society it often takes on a more ritualistic character.

Ayers: There was one idea that white people did not challenge, is that, it was their destiny, their God-given right, to be in charge of the South.

It was their obligation, to domineer over black people, and that took lots of different forms.

It could go all the way from the most brutal and simple violence to these elaborate rewriting of a constitution.

The goal was to make sure that this remains a white man's country.

Alexander: We sit in America and often judge violence that's perpetuated in other societies.

How barbarian they are.

Well, we've done the same thing.

The problem is, that is not talked about in American society.

We skip over the violence to try on many levels to hide from it.

Gates Jr.

: I remember when I read "Of the Coming of John," in The Souls of Black Folk.

And that was my first encounter with lynching, and it haunted me.

You know, it frightened me.

and it's something I always thought about whenever I saw images of people in the South.

Stevenson: Lynching became the area that I was most concerned about because it was the thing that we were most silent about in America.

And I guess I just felt like we have to make this visible.

That's what gave rise to this idea of creating a memorial that would expose people, in a very intense way, to this history of lynching.

And for me, you know, going to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, the Genocide Memorial in Rwanda... I wanted it to speak to the anguish and the pain in a very direct way.

The monuments begin at eye-level in the first corridor, and they rise as we're walking down, and they rise even more, and now you're standing underneath of this history.

The people who carried out these lynchings could have buried the bodies in the ground and gotten away with more violence, but hanging was preferred because it lifted these bodies up to terrorize and menace and taunt communities of color.

People would pose with the brutalized bodies after they conducted this violence.

They were proud to have tortured and menaced these folks.

Gates Jr.

: What was that about?

I mean, you've thought about that.

What would Freud say was really going on?

Stevenson: Yeah.

Yeah, I think there was such animosity, such bitterness, such hatred at the idea that someone was forcing them to accept the equality of black people that they had to express it, this rage.

Gates Jr.

: Who comprised a lynch mob?

Stevenson: It wasn't the Klan.

It wasn't the extremists.

It was the farmers that were, it was frequently teachers.

It was law enforcement officers.

It was the business leaders.

It was clergy.

It was anybody who was part of that community.

Gates Jr.

: We haven't been able to change the narrative about slavery.

What makes you optimistic about changing the narrative about lynching?

Stevenson: I think that narrative is going to change as we begin to show this brutality.

We haven't created spaces in America that motivate people when they go through it to say "never again" to racial violence and racial hierarchy.

And that's, for me, the reason why things like the memorial and museums, like this, that are direct in presenting this legacy and violence of lynching become necessary.

I want us to tell the truth about our history.

Not because I want to punish America.

I want to liberate us, but we can't get to liberation if we don't acknowledge what we've done.

Gates Jr.

: The frequency and brutality of violence against African Americans is sickening to contemplate.

A distinctly American phenomenon.

Lynchings increased in the years after Reconstruction, peaking in the early 1890s and remaining a source of terror deep into the 20th century.

The victims were overwhelmingly black.

But while white supremacists could terrorize black lives, they couldn't silence those fearless enough to expose their crimes to the world.

Bay: There were a lot of newspapers in the 19th century, published by both blacks and whites.

White newspapers would have like an occasional sort of page dedicated to Negro news.

Or if blacks were covered, at all, it was in a very negative fashion.

Cobb: If we looked at the dominant publications, we only had a kind of exculpatory story of white actions toward black people in, you know, American history, but when we want the, you know, the first draft of black history, it required that we have actual black publications and black journalists who were crafting narratives of what they saw and what they experienced and what they heard.

Gates Jr.

: A young journalist fought back by crafting positive narratives about African Americans.

Her name was Ida B. Wells.

Starting with her battle with the railroad in 1883, Wells began chronicling her fight against Jim Crow.

Though she lost her case, she didn't lose momentum as a writer, abandoning her career as a teacher, and becoming a journalist full-time.

Bay: She writes about women, politics.

She sort of writes about whatever is on her mind.

Giddings: In 1889 she becomes one-third owner of the Free Speech, which is a very militant newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, at a time when racial tensions are really rising.

Gates Jr.

: One incident, in particular, brought racial violence painfully close to home for Ida B. Wells.

Bay: One day two boys were playing marbles.

The black boy beat the white boy.

The fathers got involved.

Eventually, the whole conflict moved over to the People's Grocery store, a local black-owned grocery store that was competing with another white-owned grocery store.

Giddings: A number of black men were arrested including the three owners of the People's Grocery, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart.

In the middle of the night 75 masked men grabbed the three men from jail and take them to an abandoned railway yard and lynch them.

Ida Wells is out of town selling subscriptions.

She comes back to a community that is shocked.

Bay: Thomas Moss was a friend of Ida B. Wells, along with his wife.

Giddings: In fact, Ida is the godmother of his child.

Bay: The white press portrayed all three men quite disrespectfully.

They put up these sketch drawings of them dead with bullet wounds in their heads.

It was all very grisly.

Giddings: Ida decides that she's going to actually investigate these lynchings.

This is a woman, you know, and she's only about five feet tall.

And she has decided that she is going to go to the scenes of lynchings.

She's going to interview those who are witnesses.

She's going to collect the newspaper articles about lynchings all over the country.

Bay: Often, the allegation associated with lynching was that there had been a rape.

Ida B. Wells would find out that a lot of these allegations had absolutely no truth to them.

They masked consensual relationship between white women and black men.

Wells: Eight Negros lynched since last issue of the Free Speech.

If Southern white men are not careful they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction.

A conclusion will then be reached, which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.

Williams: Ida B. Wells says if you actually look at what's going on with these lynchings, they say that it's about sexual violence, that they're protecting white Southern womanhood, but many of these victims are actually African Americans who are doing quite well.

And the sole reason they have been targeted is to take away what they have accomplished.

Bay: Ida was out of town when this article comes out, and no sooner than it hits the newsstands, that a white mob gathers, and goes to the Free Speech and destroyed it.

She went out and got a pistol and put it in her purse.

She didn't think that she would actually be able to hold off lynchers but she wanted some of them to die while they were killing her.

Gates Jr.

: Ida B. Wells' investigative journalism came at a price.

Her newspaper attacked, her life threatened, Wells was driven out of Memphis.

But this only spurred her to write more.

As she noted in 1892, "It's with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed.

Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so."

Bay: She's supported by black women, who help her put together the funds to publish her pamphlet.

She promotes it when she goes on these speaking tours and gives lectures.

Brown: Ida B. Wells actually sets the record straight.

Her journalism and the black press are constantly keeping that dissenting voice in American society.

Gates Jr.

: How would you describe Ida B. Wells to someone who didn't know anything about her?

Hannah-Jones: She was just absolutely fearless.

She wrote about probably the most untouchable subject at that time, which was the extrajudicial killing of black men and women by mob.

Gates Jr.

: Will we always need an Ida in the world of journalism?

Hannah-Jones: Absolutely, having that voice of not just reporting the facts but of morality.

Of saying that this is an injustice that needs to be righted will always be necessary, not just in the United States, but I think in any place where peoples are oppressed.

The press is the one who has influence on policies and politics.

Failing to tell our own stories was giving up our agency.

We were never going to have a true and accurate depiction of what our lives were like, what our America was like, as long as other people were writing those stories.

And Ida B. Wells understood that in a very visceral way.

For myself, that's why I became a journalist.

Her courage has always been an inspiration to me.

Gates Jr.

: Ida B. Wells soon seized upon another platform for her activism -- the Chicago World's Fair.

The year was 1893, and the United States was playing host to the Columbian Exposition, marking the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus' watershed voyage.

The exposition's extensive use of gleaming white painted facades and bright streetlights earned its fairgrounds an ironic nickname, the White City.

Williams: This was an opportunity for the United States to showcase its progress as a modern nation on the world's stage, to showcase all of the technological, cultural, intellectual developments to prove that it was not just on-par with Europe but had surpassed it.

Blight: This was the United States saying to the world, "Come here."

And most nations did.

Something like 25 million people visited that fair in six months.

There had never been anything like this.

There were pavilions for all these other nations and countries, and they exhibited their wares and they sold their goods.

There'd never been a mingling of the marketplace of world culture and economics quite like this.

Bay: But the representation of different races at the World's Fair was often kind of racist.

It was like Africans who had been imported and were just kind of there almost like they were in a zoo.

Blight: They were dressed up in African garb, half naked dancing every day for people to see them.

There was a group of Eskimos brought from way up in northern Alaska and they had to perform in the heat of summer in all of their furs.

Williams: The World's Fair was important in the process of reconciliation of the North and South coming together, of creating a unified nation.

However, African Americans very deliberately were not included, and that sent a very clear message that African Americans were not a part of the nation.

Bay: Ida B. Wells wanted to be there to address the world.

Her idea was to hand out pamphlets to visitors.

Williams: Wells and Frederick Douglass came together to demonstrate that African Americans had indeed made significant contributions to the nation in education, in employment, in religious life.

That they had progressed from slavery.

Gates Jr.

: When "the White City" refused to give black Americans a dedicated exhibition space to display the race's progress since the Civil War, Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass decided to fight back.

Their widely-distributed protest pamphlet shone a light on African-American achievement, while also illuminating what Wells called the "twin infamies" of lynching and convict leasing.

Bay: After many black people lobbied for a long time they ultimately got some form of representation at the World's Fair, Negro Day, which proved to be enormously controversial.

Blight: The worst part of that Negro Day was watermelon stands set up all over the fair.

Frederick Douglass was asked to be the primary speaker.

And at first, he didn't wanna do it, but then he decided yes, he would.

Douglass: There is no Negro problem.

The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.

We Negros love our country.

We fought for it.

We ask only that we be treated as well as those who fought against it.

Gates Jr.

: The silver-tongued lion delivered one of his strongest indictments.

And as fate would have it, it would be one of his last major speeches.

On February 20, 1895, Frederick Douglass died in Washington, D.C., at the age of 77.

Douglass' death closed a major chapter in the history of our people and begged the question, who would step forward and lead?

Ayers: Booker T. Washington is a great American story.

He hears that there is a school in Hampton, Virginia, walks all the way across the state of Virginia on his own as a young boy.

He shows up in the school and says, "I want to come to your school."

Alexander: Booker T. Washington becomes the principal and leader of Tuskegee Institute, in Tuskegee, Alabama, situated in the lion's mouth.

He enters this space to build a school for African Americans and creates it into something that no one ever saw before.

Williams: He thought that it was best for African Americans especially from the South, to gain an industrial education, to be able to master core skills that they could then put to use and, ideally, translate that into land ownership, business ownership, into the field of teaching, and build up institutions of their own.

Ayers: He had the ear of leading white Northern philanthropists.

Washington gave them a very palatable formula to follow -- "Give me your money, and I will build schools that will produce some teachers but also the people to do the work that you think these people should be doing."

Gates Jr.

: Two years after Frederick Douglass denounced the savagery of lynching, Booker T. Washington, at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition, gave what would become his most famous address, it signaled a profound change of course.

Washington: The those of my race who depend on bettering their condition our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by productions of our hands and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life.

Gates Jr.

: Washington declared that black men had sought political power too prematurely during Reconstruction, that they would be better off dedicating their lives to aspiring to own their own farms than dreaming about election to the halls of Congress.

Downs: Washington suggests that if African Americans build a life of economic independence in the South this can be a basis for future political and legal equality.

Medford: He's talking about black people owning businesses, acquiring land and becoming independent farmers.

He's talking about self-help.

Williams: He was also a master of dissemblance, of telling white people what they wanted to hear.

But sometimes doing something opposite behind the scenes, supporting cases against discrimination, doing things that if they were made public, would certainly get him in trouble in the eyes of, of many of his white supporters.

Downs: Washington can look like a traitor to Reconstruction and a defender of it.

Because he forces us to evaluate how we think about the relationship between politics and economic independence.

For that reason he can look like both the most conservative and at times the most radical leader in a turn-of-the-century South.

Gates Jr.

: As Booker T. Washington preached the gospel of social separation, the concept of separate but equal was playing out on a much larger stage.

Crenshaw: Plessy versus Ferguson is the case that took up the question that was left by the Supreme Court a decade earlier.

If segregation is mandated by the state, is it unconstitutional?

Perry: Louisiana passed a separate cars statute essentially requiring black and white patrons to occupy separate cars.

Homer Plessy's case was actually a test case where they arranged to have this man who was a Creole of New Orleans, mixed race person, enter into a white car and then identify himself as a man of color.

It wasn't apparent visually.

Gates Jr.

: In 1892, Homer Plessy deliberately took a seat in a white-only railroad car in order to be arrested to mount a legal challenge to Jim Crow legislation.

Crenshaw: They believed they could challenge the segregation law but the Supreme Court wasn't having it.

Gates Jr.

: Four years later, Plessy's planned act of resistance resulted in an infamous Supreme Court decision that left the color line indelibly printed on the nation for generations.

Ayers: The Supreme Court in 1896 comes down with the ruling that as long as provisions are made for accommodations that are separate but they're equal to those of the first-class car or other accommodations, then it's okay.

They do not put a very fine definition of what equal might mean.

Separate is very clear, but the equal part is not.

Crenshaw: And what they conveniently covered over is that things can be cultural.

They can be based on history, they can be based on distinctions that people think are normal, and still be oppressive.

Jones: And the court creates a cover for all sorts of segregation, whether it's a streetcar or it's a school or a public swimming pool, separate but equal permits the Southern states to fully enact Jim Crow and do so with constitutional sanction.

Muhammad: And in the Plessy versus Ferguson decision a lot of white people accepted the argument that in the end; people of African decent were a fundamentally inferior race.

Gates Jr.

: As the 20th century approached, many African Americans believed that the nation had reversed course after the promising years of Reconstruction.

In the battle over the color line, white supremacists had won.

And though activists, like Ida B. Wells, refused to give up the struggle, America had entered the nadir of race relations.

Things would get worse before they got better.

Narrator: On the next "Reconstruction."

Higginbotham: The mantra was to be of service to the race.

Narrator: A people pushed forward.

Williams: In education, employment, land ownership.

Gates Jr.

: They turned inward and created a black world within a white world.

Narrator: But the future.

Muhammad: Things propaganda, vigilante violence, mob, terror.

Narrator: Looked a lot like the past.

Ayers: The goal was to make sure that this remains a white man's country.

Narrator: Next time on "Reconstruction: America after the Civil War".