RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

Gates Jr: By the 1890's, Reconstruction had been overthrown, and the Democratic Party was in control in almost every Southern state.

But in Wilmington North Carolina, there was still a glimmer of hope.

Gilmore: Wilmington was a port city.

In the 1890's it had a large, Black, middle class.

African-American people were succeeding spectacularly, really, in North Carolina.

Ali: African-Americans had over 100 businesses including barber shops and other kinds of retail.

Blight: There were Black elected officials in North Carolina a bit longer than anywhere else.

When the political lights went out almost everywhere in the South, there was still a lot of hope in North Carolina.

Gates Jr: An interracial coalition of Republicans and populists governed the state in the mid 1890's.

And the city of Wilmington was the center of Black political power.

Masur: There was a fusion movement of African-Americans and disillusioned whites who don't want to go with the Democratic Party.

Painter: The fusionists enfranchised Black voters and gave Black voters some power.

Ali: There was great and deep resentment among the wealthiest of Wilmington's white population, because here they are being governed by, as they called it, Negro rule.

And this was an affront to them and in a whole host of ways.

So they weren't gonna tolerate it.

Richardson: White Democrats in the area said, "No, we don't care that this is a legitimately elected government.

We will not be governed by African-Americans."

Gilmore: And so they concocted a fake rape scare, publicizing what they called outrages.

Black men against white women.

And they spread the news like wildfire.

It's not as if they're reporting.

It's a complete propaganda campaign of fake news.

Brown: That's where a lot of the animating fear of Black people, potential Black rapists comes in.

That's where whipping people up into a violent frenzy against people who might be taking their jobs or their status comes in.

Ayers: So when you add that threat to white women to the fact that there are Black officeholders in Wilmington, these white, Southern Democrats feel they have no choice, as they see it, but to rise up and bring justice and order and purity to Wilmington by driving out Black people.

Gates Jr: On November 10, 1898, white supremacists saw their opportunity to remove the Black leaders and their allies from office by force.

Gilmore: Alfred Waddell, who is a washed up, older man, who had been a colonel in the Civil War leads a mob into the city.

Waddell had promised, that if the leaders did not surrender he would choke the Cape Fear River with their bodies.

It's a planned execution of the city's Black, male leadership.

Ali: There was a white mob that came out and basically forced the resignation of all the aldermen and the mayor, and then went on a rampage, killing African-Americans and any sympathizer.

African-Americans fought back, but clearly they were overwhelmed.

Gilmore: People were in an absolute panic and fled to the woods, and as they fled along the roads white people would kill them as they were fleeing.

No one knows how many people died.

Blight: It was a violent coup d'tat, is really the best thing to call it.

Painter: As they said, the Cape Fear River ran with blood.

So they did through violence and through terrorism what could not be done through politics.

Gilmore: Immediately the white response is we have done such a great thing, and they brag about it.

We have restored good government.

We have restored white man's government to North Carolina.

Gates Jr: As Jim Crow segregation took hold across the South, white supremacists didn't just take control of state legislatures.

They took control of the narrative of their so-called redemption.

With the dawn of the new century, they began to re-write the history of the Civil War and especially the history of Reconstruction.

As George Orwell said, "He who controls the past controls the future."

In 1875, near the end of Reconstruction, the 44th Congress included seven Black House members and a United States senator.

By 1900, only one remained, Congressman George Henry White of North Carolina.

White stepped down in 1901, and there wouldn't be another Black member of the Congress for 28 years.

For Black people, this period is known as the "nadir" of race relations in America.

The triumphs of Reconstruction became a distant memory, a dream.

And white people, North and South, were all too eager to put Reconstruction behind them.

Blight: The country was thirty years out from the Civil War.

The states were back under firm control of the Southern Democratic Party.

White supremacy was triumphant.

Cox: Northern veterans and Southern veterans get together and have these reunions.

That's really an important part of that reconciliation.

Ayers: They'll come and shake hands.

Hey, good fight.

I didn't agree with what you were fighting for, but we can put it behind us.

The idea would be we could put this country together if we just ignore the claims of Black Americans to the claims of American citizenship.

Maxwell: So that puts the South in the position of not being just kind of this abhorrent misbehaving region, but fully somehow American in a real political sense.

It's like the propaganda's worked.

Gates Jr: The propaganda campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of the South commenced almost as soon as the Civil War was over with the publication of a book called, "The Lost Cause."

The Lost Cause argued that the intentions of the Confederacy had been righteous and admirable, in spite of its military defeat.

Thirty years after the war, this idea took on a new life.

The Lost Cause became the ideological justification for white supremacy.

Blight: You get to the 1890's, The Lost Cause became not about loss at all.

It became a new kind of narrative about the victory over Reconstruction.

Cobb: There's a kind of entire mythology associated with what Reconstruction was attempting to do; that it involved the subordination of the white population by the Black population, that the Reconstruction legislators were ignorant, venal, or worse, predatory.

Muhammad: The Dunning School for example, named for a Columbia University professor who was hellbent on proving the point that Black people were incapable of self-governance, and that Reconstruction had been a big failure and a big fiasco.

Williams: It was all wrong, you know?

So it becomes this way of justifying and making a case for why you need Jim Crow.

Blight: The Jim Crow system isn't just a series of laws.

It's a set of beliefs, philosophies, attitudes, and even stone monuments.

Gates Jr: Confederate monuments are a lasting legacy of this revisionist history, and white women of the South were the ones spearheading the effort to erect hundreds of these memorials to their lost cause.

A group calling themselves the United Daughters of the Confederacy organized in Nashville in 1894.

Blight: The UDC became a powerful and prominent force, which took control of Civil War memory.

Cox: The Daughters want to honor the entire generation of the 60's, both men and women, and write a new narrative that lifted them up from defeat.

In that first meeting there were maybe thirty women.

That was one chapter.

The next year 110 chapters.

Within 10 years, there were 30,000 women in the organization.

They were wanting to honor their ancestors, but they were also grappling with what did a defeated South mean for their generation?

And it's that generation that seems very, very resentful of the fact that they are no longer going to inherit the old South.

They won't be Southern belles.

They won't have slaves at their beck and call.

Southern civilization to them had been lost.

Gates Jr: The United Daughters of the Confederacy wanted to regulate how the story of the story of the Civil War would be taught in schools.

They wanted children to learn their version of the story, and that meant a pro-Southern, pro-Confederate history.

Cox: They formed textbook committees.

And so essentially just vetted them whether or not they should be adopted by the school system in their state.

Blight: They would lobby these publishers and try to influence the story of the Civil War in the textbooks.

Cox: This is just an example of the kinds of things that they felt should be rejected.

Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves.

Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves.

Cox: And so these children who are growing up in the South are being inculcated with these lessons about states' rights, about slavery, about their ancestors, who should be regarded as heroes.

And when those children of the South grew up, they became segregationists, in the '50s and '60s.

I don't think Americans understand the full effect that The Lost Cause has had on their lives.

It's come to them through their textbooks, through monuments, through music, through films.

It's one of these things, you don't even know it's going on, and yet you're being shaped by it.

Gates Jr: I'm standing at the Confederate Memorial Monument in Montgomery Alabama, on the grounds of the state capitol.

Dedicated in 1898, three years before the state disenfranchised Black voters, it's just one of hundreds of monuments celebrating the Confederacy across the south.

African-Americans have lived with these haunting symbols of their oppression for over a century, but it's only recently that a national debate has erupted over their existence.

Man: This is our town now!

Man 2: We are about to march over to a statue with our torches and sort of make our presence felt in the most peaceful manner possible.

Ayers: No one would wish for the conflict we had in Charlottesville over the monuments, but I do believe that the conversation about the monuments is something that we have to go through.

I do think people are going to have to think about "So why are these here?

And what work are they doing?

And who put them up?

And why?"

Landrieu: And in the second decade of the 21st century asking African-Americans or anyone else for that matter to drive by property that they own, occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person's humanity seems perverse.

Gates Jr: Mitch Landrieu was the mayor of New Orleans between 2010 and 2018.

He made a bold, quite controversial decision to remove the Confederate monuments from the city.

Landrieu: There were four of these Confederate monuments.

3 in New Orleans, and then there was one to the Klan.

Gates Jr: Who brought the existence of these statues first to your attention and the fact they were problematic?

Landrieu: Well it was my really dear friend who I grew up with, Wynton Marsalis.

He said, "Do you know that Louis Armstrong left this city because of that statue?"

Or he said, because of the attitude that allowed that statue to stand up.

I started to do research, like well who owns the monuments?

Who put them up?

I learned that they were put up as a political message by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

They wanted to tell the story that The Lost Cause was a noble cause to preserve the South as it was, which at that time, as you know, had people of color enslaved.

So that's when I called Wynton back and I said, "We need to do this."

Gates Jr: How difficult was it?

Landrieu: It was painful.

It was awful.

They firebombed the car of the first contractor.

We're, we're in the second decade of the 21st century now.

Gates Jr: Wow.

Landrieu: They firebombed his car.

And the people that were taking them down they had to put masks on 'cause they would get death threats.

Gates Jr: Mitch, did the vitriol that you encountered, the depth of the vitriol surprise you?

Landrieu: Yeah, it shocked me, actually.

It saddened me.

And I was sad for our country.

Gates Jr: Well how do you reconcile your own Southern identity with history?

Landrieu: I mean, slavery is the worst thing that's happened in this country.

As a Southerner, I kind of get tired of the rest of the country looking down on us saying everybody down there is backward and racist and can't read and write.

That's not who we are, but we have to confront the truth, which is that the Civil War was designed to destroy the country over the cause of slavery.

It is not a condemnation.

It is a reckoning of how we can get better over time.

But we can't do it if we don't recognize that what we did in the past was wrong.

Gates Jr: Confederate monuments were only one form of The Lost Cause propaganda that spread across the South in the 1890's.

Even more important, was retelling and revising the story of slavery itself.

Foner: You get a proliferation, now, of images of slavery, which are more nostalgic.

The lithograph print makers, publishing images of the old plantation with happy children, you know, Black children playing and an older guy playing a banjo.

Barnes: There's an incredible romantic idea that during the grand Old South when African-Americans were slaves they were prosperous, they were happy, they were joyful, they had everything provided for them.

In reality, it's a story that's very much grounded in rape and torture and exploitation but became a story of familial love.

Gates Jr: The happy slave, the bumbling simpleton, the dangerous predator.

Racist stereotypes of African Americans came in all shapes and sizes and in vivid color.

Newly developed mass printing techniques meant that an unprecedented number of demeaning images of Black people could saturate American popular culture.

Blight: The architects of Jim Crow use popular culture.

And in cartoons all over magazines you had the large lipped, blackface, near human beings portrayed in every kind, sometimes they were portrayed as animals.

Willis: Advertising images were circulated in the popular media outside of the Black community that showed demeaning images of the Black body as undesirable.

Barnes: So, if you want to sell soap, you want to be a clean white person, you don't want to be like these dimwitted Africans, as they're arguing in these stereotypes, then you want to buy these specific brands.

Blight: It was a popular cultural use of and denigration, in 1,000 ways, of the humanity of Black people.

Barnes: This era is called the Jim Crow era.

And we think of that in terms of an era of racial segregation, legally.

But the name Jim Crow actually comes from the most popular blackface character in the 19th century.

Gates Jr: Many racist stereotypes of African Americans had their roots in the minstrel show.

Minstrelsy was the most popular form of entertainment in America throughout the 19th century.

White actors blackened their faces with burnt-cork and performed skits that mocked and demeaned Black people.

Minstrelsy's popularity only increased in the twentieth century.

Chude-Sokei: Minstrelsy is the beginnings of the American popular culture, American media I would argue, and it's rooted in a performance tradition in which whites perform as their idea of Blacks.

They blacken their faces, they exaggerate Black features, and they fetishize how they think Black people talk.

Man: Oh Mr.

Billy, you know I'm crazy about my gal.

I loooove that woman.

Man 2: Tell me, Cotton.

How do you kiss your girl?

Man: Well, first you gotta get a girl... Chude-Sokei: Minstrelsy ultimately argues that Blacks are stupid.

That they're not worthy of citizenship, that they can't be citizens.

That they are rapacious and they're greedy.

One of the reasons minstrelsy featured the exaggeration of Black lips was not just because whites thought Blacks had bigger lips but because they thought Blacks had overwhelming appetites.

Their mouths were exaggerated.

Their eyes were so curious.

They had no room for logic and tempered moods.

They were out of control.

The minstrel shows had multiple stock characters; the Mamie figure, the Zip Coon, dandy, the Sambo.

And then there's also Jim Crow.

Jim Crow figure was the plantation darky.

The stupid one, the bumbling one.

Barnes: One thing that's important about these characters, when they switch to amateur form and blackface is being performed in schools, being performed by politicians, being performed in churches, you now have everyday Americans who are reading these books, buying the sheet music, and they're learning darky dialect.

The majority of these shows are used as fundraisers often for the Democratic Party.

And so there's a direct link between these blackface shows and Jim Crow politics.

Gates Jr: Popular culture was devastatingly effective in reinforcing white supremacy, but African-Americans would find ways to combat this onslaught of racist imagery.

Barnes: Frederick Douglass is a master at understanding the media revolution and specifically photography.

He thought that photography was a way to reclaim your image.

Willis: Photography enters into this country in 1839, 1840.

It was really popular as soon as it arrived here from Paris; the daguerreotype specifically.

And Black photographers and white photographers opened up studios.

So it became the medium of choice because it was accessible for people.

Stauffer: As Frederick Douglass said, with Daguerre's invention, for the first time ever the poor servant girl or a slave could now have a portrait of herself that surpassed in detail, and thus in beauty, what the most powerful king or queen could have had ten years ago.

Willis: Photography opened up the doors for a number of families to tell their own stories.

Gates Jr: In 1900, a World's Fair opened in Paris.

A 32-year-old college professor from named William Edward Burghardt Du Bois had been asked to help curate an exhibit on African Americans.

Williams: W.E.B.

Du Bois is teaching at Atlanta University twenty, thirty years outside of the end of the Civil War, and he's beginning to look at the social life of Black people.

Barnes: Du Bois automatically recognizes that photography needs to be playing a prominent role in recasting how African-Americans are perceived on this global stage.

Williams: He put together a remarkable exhibit, using photographic representation to demonstrate the progress of the race but also the beauty of the race depicting children, men and women in their finest dress, demonstrating that African Americans were dignified, respectable human beings.

Willis: There's an image of four women on the campus of Atlanta University.

They're posing.

It's a sense of pleasure that I see in the way that they're posing.

We see women who are seeing themselves as the new women for the new century, and they understood their sense of empowerment.

The exhibition included Civil War soldiers who received the Medal of Honor.

And so there was so many stories that changed the negative narrative through photography.

Gates Jr: The Paris exposition was just the beginning for W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Five years earlier, Du Bois became the first Black person to earn a Ph.D.

from Harvard.

He was bold, brilliant, and deeply concerned about the increasingly desperate plight of his people.

Perry: He comes from great Barrington, Massachusetts.

He's this incredibly gifted intellectual.

He's obviously an imperfect man, was a sexist as was common place with men in that period, was an elitist.

But he's certainly one of the founders of Black studies as a field.

Cobb: Du Bois is the lion in the path of everybody who thinks about these questions.

He's a singular figure.

He writes that in his journal at age 25 that, you know, he's going to try to defeat white supremacy.

Gates Jr: Du Bois has been one of my heroes since I first read his masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk when I was 19 years old.

He's been a guiding light for me and for other Black scholars.

Cornel, at what age were you first exposed to W.E.B.

Du Bois?

West: Oh, let me think.

I must have been about 16 years old, reading Kierkegaard, a little bit of Karl Marx.

And lo and behold, there was W.E.B.

Du Bois' "Souls of Black Folk".

Gates Jr: What were your impressions?

What was it like when you read the "Souls of Black folk"?

West: Well, I was too young to fully appreciate his genius.

But it was clear that his highfalutin' language was something I had to wrestle with.

It was clear that the subtlety of his mind, the nuanced formulations that he put forward had something to do with what it meant to be a human being in Black skin in a white supremacist civilization like the United States.

Gates Jr: He did.

Du Bois famously said one ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro, two warring ideals in one dark body.

And we call it, the metaphor of double consciousness.

Tell me about the metaphor of double consciousness.

How important was it?

How original um was it?

West: To be a problem, to be cast as a problem people rather than just people with problems, all human beings have problems.

But when you're a problem people, your humanity's called into question.

You're homogenized.

Each Black person's interchangeable, substitutable.

And so Du Bois says, lo and behold, this double consciousness is one in which we still know we're in America but not of it, aspiring to be an American, knowing that you are here longer than many Americans.

You know, America really ought to be celebrating Du Bois every day.

Because if, if Black people had produced a different kind of intellectual leader, a leader who said, "You terrorize us, we'll terrorize you, you hate us, we'll hate you," America wouldn't exist as a democracy.

It'd have been fascist a long time ago.

Gates Jr: Some leader could have declared war, said, we are in the state of war.

West: Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Gates Jr: Said we're going to fight back, yeah.

West: Absolutely.

Gates Jr: Do you think you would have gotten along with Du Bois?

West: I would have loved him.

But I'd love that Negro at a distance.

I got too much Curtis Mayfield, Richard Pryor, and Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin in me.

You know, he didn't appreciate blues, he hated jazz, and so forth.

He's not my kind of Negro.

But, he's the greatest Black scholar in the history of, of the country.

I think he's the greatest public intellectual in the history of the empire.

But he's too elitist and highbrow, that's not my thing.

Gates Jr: And very, and very stiff.

I tell my students that Du Bois was so arrogant, he slept in a three-piece suit, man.

Du Bois became a leading figure in a generation of African-Americans who came of age during the rise of Jim Crow.

They called themselves the New Negroes for a new century, and they were intent on reconstructing the image of their race.

Higginbotham: This New Negro, this person born in freedom, is educated.

You have people who understand that they are to be leaders.

The mantra of that time period was to be of service to the race.

Barnes: The Talented Tenth is a theory that Du Bois puts forth, which is the idea that 10% of African-Americans at this time period would be exemplary.

That they had a social responsibility and an economic responsibility to lift up everyone else.

Jones: Black women are coming into their own politically, and they themselves believe, preach, right, that they are the essential agents in the fight against Jim Crow going forward.

Higginbotham: On the one hand, oppression is real.

But on the other hand, what is equally real are the institutions like churches and schools and the rise of clubs and fraternities and sororities.

And all of that is giving Black people a sense of what's called self-help.

Gates Jr: The New Negro generation sought to engender Black uplift through individual achievement and through production of the arts, especially fiction and poetry.

Perry: When we think of this period that part of what African Americans were doing was writing themselves into history.

Many African-American novelists would send copies of their novels to the president or to senators as a way of making sort of political arguments through art.

So to display artistic excellence to the larger society, was really a way of saying, "You're absolutely wrong.

We are not inferior.

In fact, we can do work that is quite extraordinary and that you find compelling, America."

Martin: The tragic dimension of African-American experience, slavery, Jim Crow, lynching.

I mean, all of that is writ large.

And so there are a variety of ways to try to make sense of that.

Music is one of the important frames through which you try to make sense of the world that you find yourself in.

Gates Jr: Music has been an essential part of the Black experience since the earliest days of slavery.

African-Americans have given birth to an entire genealogy of musical forms that are fundamental to America's national identity.

Among the most popular Black musical genres of the late 19th century was ragtime, and its opposite extreme was a racist tradition known as the coon song.

Chude-Sokei: Coon songs, although many don't want to talk about them because of their being so rooted in racism and racial travesty and they're called coon song, they really are the birth of American popular song.

You can trace the emergence of jazz and blues and rock all through this thing called the coon song... (Singing inaudibly) which enabled a lot of Black writers and composers to get professional attention.

Perry: So James Weldon Johnson is one of those figures, those kind of extraordinary race men of the late 19th century who really shapes the period.

He and his brother Rosamond Johnson have classical musical training, but they also get a lot of popularity writing coon songs that sort of played upon racial stereotypes.

It creates a complicated tension between Black artists and Black political activists because there were those who said, you know, you should absolutely never do this, and others who said, this is how I get to pursue my craft.

Gates Jr: In the late 19th century, Black performers began touring their own minstrel shows, putting on blackface and mimicking white people who were mimicking them.

They were both artistic and financial opportunities in the art form.

One legendary comedy duo rose above the competition by ironically marketing themselves as the, "Two Real Coons".

In 1896, Bert Williams and George Walker brought their act on the New York stage.

Chude-Sokei: Two Real Coons, the impact of that phrase is identical to in the 1980s, when we had a group called Niggas With Attitude.

It is identical.

The point was to shock.

But it was also to take back that term.

Barnes: That name really turns blackface on its head.

Because when you're the real coon, as an African-American performing in blackface, that automatically negates what white performers are doing in blackface, that they are no longer authentic.

Chude-Sokei: George Walker even wrote that, you know, we did this because we got tired of seeing our race being made to look stupid by whites.

Bert Williams would counter that and say, well, when I saw it, I saw whites making themselves look stupid.

I would describe their minstrelsy as very much pro-Black blackface.

They operated and traveled with an enormous theatrical organization that was Black-owned and Black-controlled.

But what people didn't realize is that the only person who wore blackface, generally as the shows became more elaborate and more successful, was Bert Williams.

It's important to know that he wore blackface to draw all the attention of the genre, the form minstrelsy, to him.

You came because it was a coon show, because it was Bert Williams in blackface.

But while that's happening, all the other Black performers are not wearing blackface.

They're putting on different kinds of theater.

Chude-Sokei: With Bert Williams as the last darkie on stage, it enabled Black popular theater to emerge, to grow, under, I think, the guise of blackface.

Gates Jr: As his extraordinary talent carried him from the vaudeville stage to Broadway to moving pictures, Bert Williams became one of the first Black celebrities and the highest paid Black performer in the country.

Chude-Sokei: To study Bert Williams' success, it requires that you pay attention to the power of the raised eyebrow.

The power of the smirk.

What made Bert Williams so good is that, if he's performing the bumbling darkie and the whites are appreciating that, he is raising his eyebrow.

And the Blacks are appreciating that, right?

So that kind of split is something that he, I think, developed and that kind of charts a narrative for a lot of Black performers, how to signify to this community and that one, at the same time.

Barnes: W.C.

Fields described Bert Williams as the funniest man I ever saw, but the saddest man I ever knew.

And it's this idea that at the turn of the century, Black comedians could only be accepted if they were grotesque.

That was the term that was used a lot by theater critics.

And that really began to torment psychologically a lot these comedians, who felt that they could not be accepted for their genius as themselves, unless they were hidden behind the minstrel mask.

Chude-Sokei: It is possible to use racism to mock racism.

It's just really hard to do.

Now someone like Dave Chappelle is famous for trying to articulate.

There are a number of Black artists and performers who play with racial stereotypes.

That's something that should be traced back and given to Bert Williams as the real forefather of this meta anti-racism.

Martin: I think, just the act of performing, trying to represent blackness in a public space, especially to a non-Black audience, is a deeply political moment.

Gates Jr: Though they found ways to express themselves through literature and journalism, music and art, Black people had virtually no political power in the early 1900's.

And if that was ever going to change, they would have to organize.

Since the death of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington had been the most famous and most powerful African-America leader in the country.

But as the first decade of the twentieth century unfolded, Washington's critics increased in number.

Led by Du Bois, a new generation was finding its political voice.

Williams: It's important to remember that the Black community never has been monolithic.

That there were important political and ideological debates taking place within Black America.

Crenshaw: The classic debate would be between someone like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Out of the decline of Reconstruction came different pathways about how Black people should secure their well-being, how they should move forward.

Booker T. Washington says, "You survive by making ourselves useful as manual laborers to white people and to industrialists."

Medford: Washington has power and influence, because white Americans have given him power and influence.

But that doesn't mean that Black America accepts him as their leader.

Crenshaw: Now W.E.B.

Du Bois represented a class of African-Americans who repudiated the idea that the only way forward was through subservience.

Their belief was that the pursuit of equality, the pursuit of equal citizenship was through agitation.

And that we needed to know more about law and our rights to agitate at all levels for better social policies for African-Americans.

Gates Jr: To plot a path forward, Du Bois joined forces with a like-minded newspaper publisher named William Monroe Trotter.

In the summer of 1905, Du Bois and Trotter invited 59 prominent Black men to a meeting in Fort Erie, Ontario.

They named their organization the Niagara Movement.

Martin: The Niagara Movement was an organization of African-Americans who are critical of the approach of Booker T. Washington.

And they offer a program that is far more into resistance, far more into protest, far more into a kind of nationalist vision.

It's gonna be working with whites on their own terms.

Gates Jr: One of the Niagara Movement's priorities was to agitate against the racial violence that had persisted since Reconstruction.

Their main focus was on lynching.

In Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, unsubstantiated rumors of a sexual assault enraged white residents, who took the law into their own hands.

The mob murdered two Black men, injured dozens of Black people, and burned over forty homes to the ground.

The carnage made national news.

Bay: The riot that took place in Springfield in 1908, somehow captured the public imagination.

Williams: The fact that this happened in the North, in the home of Lincoln, was shocking.

Giddings: It was a moment when reformers in the North, a number of them who are working on so-called Negro issues knew that what was happening to African-Americans was poisoning the entire nation.

Bay: One person who drew attention to the riot, was a white journalist named William English Walling.

Giddings: Walling says that, it's time now, that Blacks have to have complete equality.

And so this was like a clarion call to do something else, to have another kind of organization.

And this is really some of the beginnings of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The NAACP will put lynching at the center of its agenda.

Williams: The NAACP had a largely white leadership early on.

There are African-Americans who are skeptical of the organization.

There is this question, well you know, I don't know if we can trust them, are they only gonna be advocating for themselves, are they really out there for me?

Williams: White progressives realized that it was essential to have African Americans as part of it, and that's why W.E.B.

Du Bois' presence in the founding of the NAACP was so critical.

Cobb: Du Bois, who had been leading the Niagara Movement, heretofore an all-Black group, but had struggled around the exact thing that an interracial group would have, no problem with, which was access to funding and, you know, the people who could write checks that kept the movement afloat.

Williams: Du Bois' official title was Director of Research and Publications.

And he edited the NAACP's journal of news and opinion entitled, "The Crisis".

Gates Jr: "The Crisis" was the perfect vehicle through which Du Bois could blend political activism with art and literature.

A monthly magazine with nationwide circulation, it chronicled Black achievement, laid out the goals of the NAACP and agitated for social justice.

Bay: "The Crisis" provides a mixture of all kinds of journalism from protests, stories about Black accomplishments, Black children, Black families.

It's contains a lot of great writing and becomes a major national voice for African Americans.

Williams: "The Crisis" covers were central.

W.E.B.

Du Bois was personally involved with the covers of Crisis.

He also hired a number of Black photographers.

Perry: The covers, they were really sort of beautiful and more humane depictions of African-American in contrast to caricatures.

So, this idea that culture and representation was part of the terrain for the struggles for racial justice, was really important.

Alexander: When he becomes the editor of the NAACP, it's in that first decade where Du Bois will sharpen his tone and his approach and he will begin to critique America like no other.

Gates Jr: "The Crisis" magazine gave Du Bois a platform for political commentary.

He used it to address a national audience, even the president of the United States.

Du Bois: We want to be treated as men.

We want to vote.

We want our children educated.

We want lynching stopped.

Be not untrue, President Wilson, to the highest ideals of American democracy.

Gates Jr: African-American leaders like Du Bois were cautiously optimistic about President Woodrow Wilson's racial policies when he was elected in 1912, even though Wilson was a Democrat from the South.

Painter: We have at the turn of the 20th century, the Republican Party as the party of Black civil rights, and the Democratic Party as the anti-Black party.

Jones: So over time the Republican Party will abandon many of the interests that African-Americans have.

Particularly those related to civil rights.

Williams: African-Americans are joining the Democratic Party because it represents more progressive values.

So there is tentative hope when Woodrow Wilson is elected.

There is skepticism because he is a white Southerner, but they still hope, they still believe.

What other choice do they have?

Blight: Wilson, though, in many ways a progressive thinker and progressive politician, was a white supremacist.

Williams: No sooner than Woodrow Wilson entered the White House he segregated federal offices.

Williams: So you get segregation in federal employment, and African Americans are devastated.

Gates Jr: The hopes of Du Bois and other activists were dashed.

James Weldon Johnson said that his distrust and dislike of Wilson "came nearer to constituting keen hatred for an individual" than anything he had ever felt.

Woodrow Wilson would firmly establish his reputation as an unreconstructed Southerner after he hosted the screening of a film at the White House during the winter of 1915.

That infamous picture was titled "The Birth of a Nation", directed by D.W.

Griffith.

The three-hour saga fictionalizing the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction was a pioneering artistic achievement in the history of cinema.

But it was also a monumentally racist piece of 'Lost Cause' propaganda.

It sought to transform the Ku Klux Klan from terrorists into heroic vigilantes, protecting the country from the perils of racial equality.

Cobb: Birth of a Nation marked not only the arrival of a new medium of communication, and that being cinema, but the way that that new medium could be deployed to further the old biases of American society.

And African-Americans immediately recognized what the dangers are implicit in this.

It's not coincidental that there is a scene in which there is a young white woman who is being pursued by this rapacious Black man who's actually a white actor in blackface.

And she hurls herself off of a cliff rather than be so defiled.

This was meant to strike directly at a peculiar part of the psychology of white men of the South and beyond, and them understanding that their fundamental role in life was the protection and preservation of white womanhood, from Black people.

Brown: The Birth of a Nation really is this amazing, big, gigantic, epic film that fixes a certain story of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the minds of the American public.

And that story is that Black people were too lazy and ignorant to fully master the citizenship that they were offered by Reconstruction.

Masur: There's a series of scenes in Birth of a Nation that are supposed to be taking place in the South Carolina legislature during Reconstruction.

There's a title card that says, this is a facsimile of something that really happened.

And then it shows Black legislators doing all of these things that are kind of desecrating any kind of dignified political process.

They put their feet on the desks, they're eating fried chicken.

They're swigging out of a flask.

It's, to me, one of the absolute worst of the many horrible scenes in Birth of Nation because it's denigrating everything to do with African-Americans entry into politics.

And it's reinforcing this idea that the entire Reconstruction experiment was a disaster, it was a mistake.

And, and the reality is, of course, it was, that was not how it was.

Cobb: The initial reception is rapturous.

The film is shown to sold-out audiences not simply in the South but around the country and in major Northern cities.

The film, not surprisingly, spawns a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, which had actually died out in the 19th century.

And they adopt the burning cross as part of their iconography.

Prior to this, the Ku Klux Klan had no such ritual.

Gilmore: You can get a sense of the impact of Birth of a Nation by seeing how strongly the NAACP opposed it.

They picketed.

Perry: There's a widespread sense of outrage about Birth of a Nation, particularly with respect to the screening of it at the White House.

There are numerous op-eds written against it.

There is a clear sense that Wilson's animus towards people of color was firmly established in that moment.

Gilmore: But it's a losing battle to try to say, this isn't what happened, because the production is so fabulous for the times.

People had never seen film like this.

The white audience loves it.

This must be the true story because I see it on the screen.

They had a very vulnerable population, just like we do now with social media.

And so the trick is complete.

They've bought into the propaganda, all of the rape scares, all of the Black beasts in charge of government.

And now it's the truth.

Gates Jr: The Birth of a Nation was the cultural apex of Southern redemption, seeking to erase even the memory of the positive contributions and progress that Black people had made during Reconstruction.

Gilmore: So this history of a Black middle class, that was aspirational, had been completely lost.

It's easier to think that those people never existed.

It's easier to think that slaves had great fortune to be freed and it took 40 to 50 years to get an education and get land.

That's not at all what happened.

Reconstruction was actually a revolution that was undercut in the 1890s.

It was undermined by a political scam, the likes of which the United States had never seen before.

Gates Jr: By 1915, with propaganda like the "Birth of a Nation" now accepted as historical fact, Black people had little hope for equal rights.

Their moment in the sun had long passed, and the shadows were growing longer.

But they never abandoned the hope that burned brightly in the earliest years of their emancipation.

Foner: If you say Reconstruction was an attempt to remake American society on the basis of equality well it didn't succeed in the long term.

But I think it's very important to look at the agency of slaves... men, women, who seized the opportunity presented by the Civil War to push forward their own aspirations.

Hahn: It's African-Americans and radical whites who imagine a different sort of world, who make the high-minded arguments for citizenship, for civil rights, for democracy.

Bay: People like Ida B. Wells, W.E.B.

Du Bois.

Frederick Douglass knew that they were talented and fully the equal of whites, and they just could not accept this sort of second-class citizenship, and each generation would kind of come to this conclusion again and again, and they would keep on fighting.

Crenshaw: I think once we've tasted freedom, once we've experienced freedom, once we've been able to see our agency actually create schools and laws it drives a constant willingness to continue to sacrifice, to continue to agitate, to continue to demand that which you have experienced.

When we look around the world today we see dynamics and elements of inequality, and we need to have an explanation for it.

If you don't know the history of Reconstruction, if you don't know what was tried and then dismantled then your inference about why we still have these problems is it's a problem with the people.

It's a problem with their work ethic, their family structure, their values rather than it's a problem of an unfinished revolution, which Reconstruction was.

Gates Jr: If we define Reconstruction as the process by which our country tried to come to terms with the abolition of slavery, you might say it never ended... because we Americans are still grappling with what it means to be a truly multi-racial society with genuine equality for all.