Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lessons Of The Reconstruction Era 20240714

Next on American History tv, u. S. Commission on civil rights hosts a program entitled lessons of the reconstruction period. Historics eric historians eric foner and Thavolia Glymph discuss the changes brought about by reconstruction, the backlash against these changes, involving historical views about the era and challenges former slaves faced and their descendents have continued to face since then. We will return now to the next iteration of the commissioner speaker series. This is titled lessons of the reconstruction period for todays civil rights debates. I think the vice chair and the commissioner for suggesting this month possible speaker topic this months speaker topic and coordinating the appearances of the professors today. Is a Professor Emeritus of history at columbia university. He is the author of over 20 books, which have won numerous awards, including pulitzer, lincoln, New York Historical society prizes. I will just show his most recent book, which i happen to have here. [laughter] his publications have focused on the history of political ideology and Race Relations in 19thcentury america. Among his books are reconstruction americas unfinished revolution, 1863 through 1867, the story of emancipation and reconstruction, and how the civil war and reconstruction remade the constitution. Our other professor is you are shaking your head, so i got that wrong . [laughter] i apologize. He is a professor in the department of history and africanamerican studies at Duke University and currently the John Hope Franklin visiting professor of american legal history at Duke University law school. She studies with a focus on 19thcentury social history. Professor glymph is the author out of the house of bondage, the transformation of the plantation households,and the forthcoming, he womens side, the battles for home, freedom and nation. She is currently competing a book manuscript titled black women and children refugees, a history of war in refugee camps in the United States. We look forward to both presentations. Thank you. Let me say it is an honor to be invited to speak to the commission. Im very happy to be here. As you mentioned, i have devoted a great deal of my academic career to studying reconstruction, but i have to acknowledge that most americans know very little about it. But the fact is that reconstruction remains, in a sense, part of our lives today. Or to put it another way, key questions facing our Society Today are in a way reconstruction questions. Who should be an american citizen . Who should have the right to vote . How to deal with terrorism, not terrorism from abroad but homegrown terrorism, like the ku klux klan and other groups during reconstruction . Every session of the Supreme Court adjudicates cases deriving from the 14th amendment enacted during reconstruction. In other words, my point is you cannot understand the american Society Today without understanding something about that period a century and a half ago. Reconstruction is also a prime example of what we sometimes call the politics of history. I dont mean whether the historian is a democrat or a republican, but in the way in which historical interpretation both reflects and helps to shape the politics of the time in which the historian is writing. For most of the 20th century, as i am sure you know, what we call the Dunning School, after my predecessor long ago, professor dunning, the Dunning School dominated historical writing and popular thinking about reconstruction. In that view, reconstruction was the lowest point in the whole saga of american democracy, a time of miss government and corruption caused by the misguided decision to grant the right to vote to africanamerican men, who, according to these scholars, work innately enable of participating in political democracy. Despite its overt racism, this interpretation dominated legal scholarship for over half a century and still exist in parts of popular historical consciousness. The remarkable longevity of this Dunning School portrait of reconstruction derived from the fact it harmonized with the racial system of the United States from 1900 until the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. It had clear political lessons. Number one, it was a mistake to give black people the right to vote in reconstruction. Therefore, the white south was justified in taking away the right to vote, as it did around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Secondly, reconstruction was imposed on the south by northerners. Maybe some of them even had humanitarian motives, but the result proves northerners do not understand Race Relations in the south, and therefore, the white south should resist outside calls for change in the racial system. This insistence upon the socalled horrors of reconstruction became more and more strident as outside pressure began to grow, challenging what we call the jim crow system. As late as 1944, it was noted in the influential work of american dilemma that when pressed about the black condition, white southerners will regularly bring forward the horrors and of the reconstruction governments, and what they called black domination. When the Civil Rights Movement sometimes called the second reconstruction, took place, the pillars, particularly racism, fell to the ground and reconstruction was completely reinterpreted. Today, most historians see reconstruction as a noble, if not entirely successful effort to establish for the first time in American History and interracial democracy, something that did not exist elsewhere in the 19th century. It was a precursor to the modern Civil Rights Movement. Now, we must remember, to understand how important reconstruction was in changing aspects of american life, we have to remind ourselves of the status of black americans on the eve of the civil war. In 1860, slavery was a powerful, economically thriving institution. It was not going away, as some people think. There were more slaves in the United States in 1860 than at any other point in our history. And slavery shaped the definition of american nationality and citizenship, giving it a powerful racial dimension. According to the Supreme Court and the dred scott decision, no black person could be a citizen, whether free or slave. Citizenship was for whites only, but there was an alternative vision mostly put forward by the abolitionist movement, black and white, which had the idea of birthright citizenship for all americans, severing citizenship from race, and with equality before the law for all of these citizens. Black political gatherings before the civil war consciously called themselves conventions of colored citizens, challenging the dominant view that citizenship was for whites or the kind of White Nationalism that citizenship was for whites only. As was kindly mentioned, my new book is coming out next week on one of the enduring legacies of the reconstruction era, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments of the constitution. I want to briefly talk about them, even though professor glymph will also delve more deeply into the legal history of reconstruction. The 13th amendment, of course, irrevocably abolished the institution of slavery and introduced the word slavery for the first time into our constitution. The founders had protected slavery in some ways, but used circumlocutions to describe it. For instance, persons held to labor, et cetera. But the 13th amendment was only the beginning of the reconstruction process. Abolitionists saw it, and many republicans also, as what you might call to use a modern phrase, the beginning of regime change. Thats really one way we might think about reconstruction, an attempt at regime change, the transformation of a proslavery regime that dominated the United States from the revolution until the civil war to an antislavery regime grounded in the ideal of equality. Most republicans were not abolitionists, but they agreed on certain principles. Slavery had caused the war and the death of three quarters of a million americans. Slavery had deprived its victims of the basic rights to which all persons were entitled. Slavery had done more than a press slaves. Than oppress slaves. It was a cancer that degraded white labor and threatened the essential liberties of all americans, such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The 13th amendment intended to change all of this and more. Unlike the emancipation proclamation of president lincoln, it applied to the entire country and made the abolition of slavery an essential part of the nations legal order. In one respect, it was truly revolutionary. It abolished the largest concentration of property in the United States. Slaves as property were the most valuable concentration of property in the country. That was just abolished with no monetary compensation to the owners. One congressman declared in the when the 13th amendment was enacted, one question of the age is settled. But if it resolved the fate of slavery, the abolition of slavery opened a host of other questions. What exactly was being abolished . Property in human beings, obviously. What about the racial inequality that was essential to slavery . Was that also abolished . What would be the status of the former slaves, and who would determine it . What did it mean to be a free person in postwar america . These were the questions on which the politics of reconstruction persistently turned. White southerners had their own answers, as became clear when lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson became president. Once lionized in the old historical interpretation as a heroic defender of the constitution, johnson today has a strong claim to being considered the worst president in American History. He lacked all of lincolns qualities of greatness. He was deeply racist. He had no sense of public opinion. He did not have the ability to work with congress. Johnson set up new governments in the south, once the war was over, controlled entirely by white southerners. They enacted a series of laws called the black codes to define the freedom africanamericans now enjoy it. They gave blacks virtually no political or civil rights, and they tried to use the law to force africanamericans back to work on the old plantations. These laws alarmed the Republican Party, which controlled congress, into thinking the south were trying to restore slavery in all but name. And in 1866, Congress Passed over johnsons veto one of the most important laws in American History, the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The first law to declare who is a free citizen of the United States and what rights they are to enjoy. The Civil Rights Act states that anybody born in the United States, except indians not taxed, is a citizen. Birthright citizenship, this principle, is a statement that anybody can be a loyal american. Race, religion, National Origin do not matter, nor does the legal status of ones parents. This measure, and then it is put into the 14th amendment, severs citizenship from race. As you know, that idea remains controversial to this day. The Civil Rights Act went on to declare that all of the citizens must enjoy basic legal equality. It does not say anything about the right to vote. That comes later. But it guarantees equality of civil rights, specifically the rights to sign contracts, own property, testify in court, et cetera. These are the rights of free labor necessary to be able to compete in the economic marketplace. What is interesting in the Civil Rights Act, it says, all citizens must enjoy these rights, the same as enjoyed by white persons. The concept of whiteness before the civil war was a barrier of exclusion, when states said only white men can vote. Whiteness was therefore used to it becomes the standard for all americans, a complete shift in the role of the concept of whiteness in our legal and political system. As i said, Andrew Johnson vetoed the civil rights boom and became the first important law enacted over the veto of the president. In his veto message, he denounced the law for what is today called reverse discrimination. He said the distinction of race and color is made by the bell to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race. And this idea that expanding the rights of nonwhites somehow punishes or takes away something from the white majority, the ghost of Andrew Johnson still haunts our discussions of race. Of course, a law can always be repealed. Quickly, congress put this and other principles into the 14th amendment. The most important change in our constitution says the bill of rights. It is long, complicated, contains major provisions that are arcane today, but the heart of the 14th amendment is the fourth section, which Constitutional Rights the rights of both citizenships and the immunities of citizens or denying to any person, but citizen or alien, any person in the country, the equal protection of the law. The word equal is not in the original constitution. Many people think the man in the streets thinks the constitution says all men are created equal. That is a noble idea but that is in a different famous document, of course. The word equal is not in the original constitution except a provision about what happens of candidates for president get an equal number of electoral votes. The 14th amendment makes the constitution what it is today, a vehicle which aggrieved citizens, who lack equality or feel they lack equality, can take their claims to federal court. Since the language is raised neutral, it does not mention black or white, in our own time, the courts have used the 14th amendment, as you know, to expand the legal rights of many groups. Most recently, medically, the rights of gay men and women and , the rights of gay men and women and lesbians in this country with regard to the right to marry. That was of course a 14th amendment decision, the gay marriage decision. The first section of the 14th amendment transformed american relationships to our government and the definition of citizenship, as i said, and as one editor at the time said, the 14th amendment changed the constitution for white man into one for mankind. It also marked a fundamental change in the federal system. It empowered the federal government for the first time to enforce the basic rights of american citizens. The bill of rights, of course, begins with the Words Congress shall make no law. It is a set of restrictions on the power of the federal government when it comes to freedom of speech, trial by jury, and other civil liberties. Before the civil war, the bill of rights only applied to the actions of the federal governments, not the states, but all three of these amendments and with a phrase that Congress Shall have the power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation. The shift from Congress Shall make no law to Congress Shall have the power just symbolizes how the reconstruction amendments made the federal government what Charles Sumner, the senator from massachusetts, called the custodian of freedom. The 14th amendment said nothing directly about the right to vote, but quickly after that, congress decided the government set up by Andrew Johnson needed to be set aside and mandated the creation of new ones in the south based on voting by both black men and white men. The first last extension of the right to vote to africanamericans in our history. The 15th amendment was limited in important ways. It denied the states the right to deprive people of the right to vote, but it did not positively create a right to vote the way many radical republicans wanted. They wanted a positive statement that all males, aged 21, had the right to vote. They warned that the 15th amendment, as written, would allow states, attempting to deny blacks the right to vote, to use a provision, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, which did not mention race, but could be enforced in ways that were racially discriminatory. This, of course, is what happened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the south took the right to vote away from black men. But the advent of black male suffrage inaugurated the period we call radical reconstruction, where new biracial governments came to power in the south, an unprecedented experiment in interracial democracy. They had many accomplishments. He created the First Public School systems in southern history. They had the first black colleges. They created the space in which the black church became a National Institution in the center of the black community. Black men held office in reconstruction at every level of government from the two first black United States senators to members of congress, state legislatures, down to sheriffs, justices of peace, school board officials, and other public servants. My estimate is that about 2000 africanamerican men actually Held Public Office in the south at some point in reconstruction. This was a revolutionary change in our political system. Of course, the problems of the emancipated slaves were not simply political. They had economic problems as well, coming out of slavery with no economic wherewithal. One might say in reconstruction, the Political Revolution went forward with the economic one did not. But the Political Revolution was drastic enough to inspire, as i mentioned, a wave of terrorism in the south by the ku klux klan and kindred groups designed to try to overthrow these governments. And handinhand with that went a slow retreat on the part of the north from the ideal of equality, the reconstruction ideal of equality. Until by 1877, the entire south was back under the control of white supremacist democrats. In the next generation, the system we call jim crow, based on disenfranchisement of black men, segmented labor market, which good jobs were reserved for whites, the severe cutback in public funding of black education, all this comes into place in the generation after reconstruction in the south. Didnt this racial system violate the reconstruction amendments . Of course, it fell to the Supreme Court to interpret those amendments. Sadly, over time, the court played a crucial role in the long retreat from the ideals of reconstruction. The broad concept of conception Constitutional Rights with which blacks and their allies attempted to imbue the abolition area slavery proved to be insecure. In the late 19th century, an alternative rightsbased constitutionalism also emerged among black activists and their allies, one that rejected the evolving Supreme Court jurisprudence, which severely limited the scope of the 13th, 14, and 15th amendments. In my book, i talk about one group, the brotherhood of liberty, a group of black lawyers and ministers and others in baltimore, who in 1889, published just to send jurisprudence, the first fullscale assault on Supreme Court decisions, limiting the scope of the constitutional amendments. The author different view of the rights that constituted the privileges and immunities of citizens, which the amendments were meant to protect. They assailed employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and lack of access to education, as violations of the constitution, which the Supreme Court would never do at that time. Can a citizen, they asked, be excluded from the paths of industrial progress and yet be a citizen of the United States . Well, let me conclude by saying we have come a long way toward fulfilling the agenda of reconstruction. Yet, in my view, the three amendments contain latent power that has never really been employed by the courts to promote the ideal or reconstruction ideal of Racial Justice. Even during the war in court, which dismantled the legal edifice of jim crow, they did not really confront the long train of decisions that Restricted National power over citizens basic rights. The justices, may be understandably, were not willing to state that the 70 raining years, the Supreme Court had just been wrong. We americans like to think our history is a Straight Line of greater and greater freedom, but actually, if reconstruction shows, it is a more complicated story up ups and downs. Rights can be gained and rights can be taken away to be fought for another day. In some ways, that seems to have been happening in our own times. And in his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln identified slavery as the fundamental cause of the civil war and challenged americans to think creatively about how to fulfill the aspirations unleashed by the destruction of slavery. And however flawed the reconstruction era that followed the civil war can continue to serve as an inspiration for those of us striving to achieve a more just society. Thank you for listening. Thank you, professor. I am quite honored to be here. Thank you for inviting me, especially vice chair patricia, who initially extended the invitation, can you hear me ok . Ok, the war was over and the union was saved, but it was a far different union. It was in some ways a new nationstate in the making and it was untested. Americans had fought each other for four years in a war that ended as we know defeated states and of the liberation of enslaved people in the establishment of the federal government. Over the course of the next 10 years, powerful men, three president s, linkedin, Andrew Johnson, and grant, along with Republican Leaders like john bingham, and Charles Sumner, would debate how to forge a new nation, and nation that could be grounded in legal, social, and political order. It made it more difficult because as Frederick Douglass famously said, slavery had not died honestly. It had not died of moral conviction. It had not died from a call to humanity. It had died from military and political necessity. So much depended on how the nation would incorporate 4 million enslaved people or formally enslaved people and formerly free people. Congressman debated and negotiated language. The language that would appear in the reconstruction legislation addressing these questions, how far could they go . How far should they go to ensure the federal law would be enforced . Freedom, James Baldwin once stated in an interview in the 1960s, was political, and economic problem. Liberty, contrast, is what came from liberation of slavery, two different things. Recent reconstruction abolished slavery, and the guaranteed people have equal protection of the law. They gave lachman the right to vote. The established birthright citizenship to make or enforce any law where privileges or immunities were taken from citizens. Taking that language from article four, section two of the constitution, and similarly, the due process lingwood at the 14th amendment from the fifth amendment to the constitution, and for the first time, congress added enforcement causes to constitutional amendments that the professor also referred to. Legal scholars have described what they call the second founding. I want to talk a little bit about that second founding as it played out from the halls of congress, and in particular help freedom and liberty affected the everyday lives of lack people. Black people. In thinking through these questions, i think should be reminded by historians that there is an immense problem when there is something profoundly unsettling in the change so immense in scope, yet so ambiguous at is impossible to say with full conviction whether it is a change for the better or for the worse. I want to say formerly enslaved people would have had no trouble answering this question. I want to say clearly that former enslaved people what it had no trouble answering the question despite the violence and rights problems that came after slavery. I want to focus this morning a bit on the civil rights bill of 1875 and the civil rights cases and to look at the question of Human Dignity. In 1865, delegates to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention submitted to the people of that state what they called a declaration of rights and wrongs. That declaration made a human rights claim stating that everyone had a right to his own body and mind. That slavery was a violation of his goals of justice and humanity which consist of personal liberty and the right to be free. It was but one of dozens of documents and protests in which he declared that continued public disrespect and attacks on their personal dignity were intolerable. We can see this and charleston where black women protested when they were refused passage in streetcars and dried off. When one filed a suit and was awarded a judgment of 250. And politicians keenly aware of the way in which women were singled out protested. For example, a political activist of charleston protested plans to segregate trust since newly planned our center centering his protest in the affront to the point. He was not willing that is what should be insulted. Nor should free black people be required to protest and mark the assaults on their dignity and rights. In january 1866, 11 groups of black people in pennsylvania sent petitions to the congress of the United States to the committee on judiciary. The 39th Congress Second session. Petition that the petition wrote this was one stated of the petitions we the members of the American Church of philadelphia most respectfully call the attention of your honorable body to the fourth article of the constitution in which we find that the United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government did knowing that in many states such a form of government does not exist, we therefore petition for the adoption of the following amendment to the constitution that there shall be no legislation within the United States or its territories against any civilized portion of its inhabitants native born or naturalized on account of race or color. All such legislation petition stated now existing is antirepublican in character and therefore void. I note also that the petitioners were a majority of women. There were 28 women and the men were the six ruling elders and the six trustees. Similarly in 1866 the same year, the North Carolina equal rights late called for the repeal of all laws and parts of laws that make distinctions on account of color. The passage of the black codes and unreconstructed Southern States were designed not only to create a subjugated workingclass, but to force that class to endure she million nations in every corner of their lives public and private. To vacate black peoples right to a private life. Woman talk about the reconstruction laws, one of the things im interested in seeing how this played out on the und, and so for example people study getting married. The faster late laws were applied to free people differently in which they were applied to white people. After the civil war, former slaveholders claimed the right to the labor of black children and they made this claim in many ways. One was to gain access by resting fathers and obliging those fathers to other give up their children or sell themselves into slavery. They didnt say slavery basis to sell themselves for one to seven years. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the act of 1883 aimed to end these practices. As a professor noted, the act of 1866 was passed over johnsons veto. The act of 1866 defined all persons born in the United States authorized them to be able to bring cases to be heard in federal court. It honored the presumption is well their primary responsibility for the enforcement of these laws lay with the state and that remained a problem. The bill of 1875 probably is more wellknown and studied. This bill was introduced in by Charles Sumner. 1870 as an amendment to a general amnesty bill of former confederates. The 1875 bill guaranteed regardless of color access to accommodations, theaters, Public Schools churches and cemeteries. It also provided that all lawsuits brought under the law would be tried in federal not state courts. Sumner as we know far hard. He did not live to see the bill when it was passed but after his death, congress continue to debate the bill. Although it did not agree on how far the power of the federal government should be extended. Out of this debate, because there were so many people who were trying to come to some kind of compromise, they not only decided to drop the most controversial provision which was to extend or to require the desegregation of Public Schools. Congress dropped the part of the bill that would have from this prohibited segregation in Public Schools. Also note the seven africanamerican representatives in this congress carried the debate in favor of the bill offering themselves personal accounts of discrimination on railroads and in restaurants. Every day my life and property him are exposed enough to the mercy of others wrote one representative from alabama. The bill became law in 1875 requiring that all persons in this country shall be entitled to be full and equal enjoyment of accommodations advantages, facilities and so forth regardless of race or color and regardless of previous condition of servitude. The second provision provided that any person did not access to facilities on account of race would be entitled to monetary restitution. These bills as we know what to many court cases that invalidated the civil rights bill and i want to talk about one. We know for example of the importance of cases like the slaughterhouse cases. The u. S. Versus stanley case in 1883 discussed a great deal by historians and scholars because this case the Supreme Court declared civil rights bills of 18 unconstitutional. This case as you know was consolidated it consisted of five cases that came before the Supreme Court and was consolidated. In this case is probably one of the most important of the Supreme Court cases, the court found that the 14th amendment granted congress the right to regulate only the behavior of states. Not private businesses, not individuals. Therefore, it foreshadowed the plessy decision that would come more than a decade later. There must be a time the court stated when black people cease to be the special favorite of the law and instead take the rank of mere citizens. There would be no time when black people could take the rank of mere citizens. Because as people on the ground kept protesting, that break was not available to them. It was not available to Samuel Harrington who wrote that he simply wanted his wife and that a white man held her as a slave. It was not available to Andrew Jackson who wrote that he wanted his wife and john fairly held her as a slave. It was not available to two black men in wilmington, North Carolina who were sold into slavery in 1866 by the civil authorities of that county. It was not available to men and women, black men and women who were acquitted and i think this has continued relevance for our society who were acquitted on criminal charges but because they cannot pay jail fees were kept in jail. Some were kept in jail so long languishing in jail so long that they could never get out because the fees kept accumulating. Ever given a choice they were given a choice they could sell themselves or stay in jail. They could sell it themselves over a number of years. Today, we face again political challenges to birthright citizenship to Voting Rights to due process to equal protection i want to say to every day dignity. In 1950, franklin reviewed a book titled southern legacy. He said of the author of the book he, the author decries any attempt to modify the pattern of segregation of legislation but he fails to admit that much of the pattern maintained solely by legislation. That still holds for much of our site is today. Thank you. Thank you very much. I will open for questions and say these were both very powerful presentations we appreciate you bringing us this history and tiptoeing into its relevance today. Thank you madam chair and to our speakers thank you for bringing this more than powerful information to us. I think i indicated to you professor the earlier this year i did participate as a panelist in the multidisciplinary conference that was sponsored at Duke University simply entitled reconstruction. Professor, you were the one of the planners and organizers about and over the today time, reconstruction that the finding era and our American History was examined. In a way that the two of you have very well done over a much shorter span of time. The point of the conference was for us to take a look at that time in history because in the opinion of many who appeared, that time set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement as we know it. It occurred to me that it is setting the stage for the work we are doing here at the commission so again, thank you so much for coming. Professor, i really appreciate you bringing the reconstruction time to us as you said on the ground. Many of our citizens during the time of reconstruction, i understand that they formerly enslaved one of the first things they sought to do was to bring their families back together. You touched on it by speaking of children being retained by slave owners and forced to work. That was what folks wanted. Basically wanted to bring their families back together. We are witnessing at this time not only deal fees are not able to pay and are required to stay in jail. Let me have you talked to us just a bit more about what this newfound freedom and the time of reconstruction meant for you talk to us about the women and the men somewhat. Talk further about daytoday life and what it is that the formerly enslaved folks were seeking. What we would view as modest request that they were seeking. Certainly and thank you for the question. I think your question gets to the heart of fundamental basic human life. And to the question of what damage is done by assistance of power. That attempt to destroy Human Dignity. I think that we are and should talk a lot about the law and how important the law is its incredibly important. At the same time, understand that when the law is unfair or the impact on peoples everyday lives can be immense. One could answer your question very simply in some ways by saying the reconstitution of families was central to what freedom meant. To no longer be separated. To no longer see a child sold or husband sold or a mother sold and to be a family again. You see and historians have documented this Incredible Movement to reconstitute families after the war ends. When i study reconstruction, i am interested from a legal point of view and understanding very clearly what congress tried to do and how the courts interpret it but i am also trying to understand if you are living in some rural place in louisiana or in my home state of South Carolina, what does this mean . For ordinary people. I think its important to say that ordinary were not ignorant of the law. It is very clear that they understood what the law meant because it had been such an important and central part of their lives. It was a lot they said couldnt be taught or educated. A law that said families had no right to be together that they could not be legally married. The law was a very central part of their lives even as slaves. When they were free, they talk about the law and they understood what the law was. They understood what youre trying to do what im trying to say here is that i cannot leave this plantation that you are trying to find a way to use the legal system in the courts to keep me here. When you keep a man or woman in jail because the fees keep adding up every day, you know they cant pay. You given that option. So yourself. We can say that we know enough to do a better job. Its not just a history of africanamericans as the history of immigrants who came from italy and poland. From portugal. We know from our own history as a nation what is important and what we need to do. We just have to do it. Thank you. Thank you both for this powerful presentations and for your lifetime of work on these important topics. I think that there was something that i detected that was parallel in both of your talks him parallel in both of your talks him him to may relate in didnt some ways to some of the discussions we see in Public Policy today. Very often, we hear about things that are regarded as false equivalencies. Things that are not the same are being put forth as being comparable. If i understood your talks correctly, i think there may have been another strain of policy debate in the reconstruction era which was a strain of what i call false superiority. The idea that granting equality to somebody is reducing or diminishing the status of someone else. I am interested to have you explain how this concept from the civil rights cases determine special favorites of the laws, how through a historical lens we are to understand those words in that Supreme Court decision at a time when the people many of them have the literal physical bond of slavery on their bodies. I am trying to understand what those words meant at that time and how you regarded as having carried through our history. I am hesitating because it is a question that seems to have an answer and one that doesnt. For me, your question and thank you for it. Your question can be sort of rephrased as what is the purpose of White Supremacy . What work does it intend to do . It would seem on the surface to make no sense at all to be fearful of former slaves were to be fearful today of immigrants. Except if that ideology is in itself flawed. As i tell myself what im trying to work through difficult historical questions, i have to always be careful to distinguish between what is history and what is ideology and the history of ideology. I think that there is no rational answer to your question. The only answer that i can think of has to do with the value of White Supremacy. I dont know if that makes sense. It does thank you. Just to add to her comment, in civil rights cases were that phrase that was used by the majority of what people have to stop being the favorites of the law, harlan dissented in that case and said whites had been the special favorites of the law from the revolution of to the civil war. The institution of slavery requires all sorts of loss laws which elevate whites about blacks. The power to apprehend any black person whether free or slave to demand identification passes, proof of freedom if they were on the road etc. You didnt need laws now to protect now that slavery was overweight people still did not be laws protecting their status. The status was inherited. Their wealth etc. From slavery. The effort to uplift of former slaves and give them a basic modicum of equality was threatening to the idea of White Supremacy and to the powers that many white people have long felt they have a right to exercise over black people. It is not surprising that after 250 years of slavery, these ideas of racial inequality would were deeply embedded in the culture. Thats why reconstruction is so were remarkable. Laws were passed, amendments were passed trying to create a genuine baseline of equality for all americans regardless of race or you maybe the astonishing thing is that reconstruction did succeed or that it was attempted at all under the circumstances. Such as reconstruction where africanamericans were empowered so quickly politically after the end of slavery. It naturally generated a great deal of resistance. Unfortunately in our history and the history of other countries, some peoples sense of their own equality is predicated on somehow denying equality to others and it is very hard to overcome that sentiment. I think it is interesting in part because very often we see debates about civil rights statutes. Sometimes, those debates are framed in the context of whether they have run their course or achieved their purpose. If you come to those debates without the historical part perspective you are sharing today, you might take that question is a good faith question being put in the time frame in which the case is presenting itself. Sometimes if you look through a historical lens, you come to understand that the question has been asked since before these measures were put in place. As you have explained, sometimes advanced against the amendments to the constitution that would later create these amendments. Understanding the context in which the arguments are advanced perhaps causes you to look at it through a different lens. One more question for you if you would be willing . I am thinking about the relationship between courts and historians. You shared with us some perspectives on the Supreme Courts jurisprudence in the reconstruction era and where that took us. It is interesting that through jurisprudence, we look at legal rules and holding. Sometimes but perhaps often divorced from the Historical Context of those rulings. We look at the rule and we cited in a different context. History as i understand it is an undertaking structural and temporal event to better eliminate where we have been. There was an author of a book called the day freedom died about the cruickshank case. He told me once that he wrote the book because the Supreme Court in the modern era cited it. He was jarred by the citation to cruickshank and he was delighted that the people did not know the circumstances of that case he hecumstances of that case was jarred to see the people did not know that case. From a judges perspective, that is not unusual. We look to legal rules and precedents from his perspective, he thought that it was jarring to cite the case. Im asking you from a historian historians perspective, how do we make sense of the craft of lawyering and judging where cases emerge in a particular Historical Context that is meaningful . But when we cite those cases and we live by the decided case, we sometimes strip away the Historical Context. I am helping you asking you to help us understand what that looks like three historians eyes. I am not a lawyer. Im not a historian. [laughter] some of my best friends are lawyers. I think it is important for those in the law whether they are practicing law or adjudicating cases to have a deep understanding of the history that surrounded the laws, amendments, decisions. I became interested in this piece because i was shocked when i started investigating this for how long the Supreme Court and other federal courts cited works of the Dunning School which are completely repudiated by historians today yet those works still pop up. Not now but into the 1960s and even the 1970s. Even the 1970s. They pop up in Court Decisions were these courts want to make a him historical reference. My first point is, if judges want to cite history, they should cite current modern history. Uptodate history not history that has been repudiated by the historical profession. I also think it is important for those thinking about the law and the origins to do what the professor just did briefly and look outside the realm where laws are created. Look outside the congress that wrote these amendments. These issues were debated up and down the society in reconstruction. The meaning of the 14th and 15th amendment was worked out in a mess constitutionalism. It was one of the few times when constitutional issues were the subject of popular debate, popular discussion, popular disagreement. To gain a better understanding of what these laws and amendments were meant to accomplish, one has to look way beyond it. For example, the views of africanamericans, the professor eloquently cited them but they are very rarely mentioned in Supreme Court cases or legal arguments that rely on the 13th through 15th amendments. Africanamericans were outside the political system when the 13th and 14th amendments were written and ratified. They dont seem to count but their initiatives and their demands helped to put on the agenda many of these principles. Birthright citizenship, equality before the law, power to protect the rights of citizens. Thats why i mentioned the brotherhood of liberty. That is an Important Group putting forward a different jurisprudence than the Supreme Court was putting forth at that time. Yet more accurately grounded in the historical record than the decisions that the Supreme Court was bringing down such as the civil rights cases and cruickshank and many others. I guess one could simply say that lawyers and judges need to know more history and our job as historians is to try to make the history as accessible as possible to them. Thank you. I just spent last weekend montgomery, alabama and have the opportunity to spend several hours at the new Justice Museum and deeply powerful memorial. I am originally from the pacific northwest. To me, the self and lynching seems very historical and south and lynching seems very historical and theoretical. My experience is probably like most americans. We dont have a sense of how long slavery was going. It to us, lynching seems like that was more a few violent incidents and not the hundreds and thousands of women and children and men who were horribly tortured and lynched or the fact that people would bring their kids and have picnics to watch this. That this was so widely accepted is just very hard for me to even begin to wrap my mind around. You both made references to the fact that slavery ended not because there was a moral movement and widespread acceptance this is what im interpreting what you said so that it ended in a way that somehow left things unresolved in terms of where we were. In terms of our understanding about race and racial superiority and what equality would mean. Is that why you feel like the courts turned their back on reconstruction and slid backwards in time . And got in the way of the progress that has been made in terms of trying to get to the democracy that our founders set . We were trying to achieve we were trying to achieve. What is it that would get us past history . I feel like we are repeating again. Blacks haveort that to wait longer lines to the, and it is because of decisions made to close polling places in black neighborhoods. There is a powerful movie that just came out about what was happening in georgia where there were Voting Machines left in warehouses while blacks were waiting 10 hours to vote. How do we get past that . What are the lessons you draw from reconstruction from the history and from what the courts did . How do we move this current Supreme Court and the courts we have today to get to a place where we can actually get to the democracy that i think most americans would like us to have. That was a very eloquently stated question. It is often said that the Supreme Court follows the election returns that is to say the decisions reflect a broader societal set of developments not simply legal arguments and precedents et cetera. Personally, i think thats not actually what happened in late 19th century. The commitment to reconstruction actually continued longer on the part of the Republican Party officials and party voters. Black and white. Then the court sort of took into account. You have to look at who these people were, what their backgrounds were, they were all educated before the civil war even though most of them were northerners, they were educated in a legal system which emphasized the power of the state not the federal government. They were educated in a legal system shot through with racism in one form or another. There are a few of them had any connection with africanamericans at all. He was from kentucky. Their social connections were all in the upper crust of Northern Society and i dont think they were well situated to actually work through the full implications for our society of the abolition of slavery and the imperatives that came out of the abolition of slavery to create a more just and interracial society. To quote something Justice Sotomayor said at a conference i attended justice have to get out more. Its not a legal doctrine but a very good point. Judges need to get out more because they need to know what is going on in society. As a tragic and decay, once you get a few of these decisions, big become lasting precedents. In a judicial environment in which cases build on past president s by and large, that is why it is shocking that cruickshank can still be cited because then you cant get beyond the mistakes that are embedded in cruickshank and the civil rights cases etc. I would endorse of course your point basically that we as a society not just judges or lawyers or commissioners but as a society have to try to muster the commitment to understand that this is still a serious problem facing our society of Racial Justice and to think about ways to address it in a robust manner. I would just add to what he said, going back to the first part of your question. I think that reconstruction, during that moment, there was very little room for the notion that we are all equal. Very little room for the concept of equality even though it is in the constitution now that black people are citizens and have the right to vote and so forth. On the ground, the best majority of americans did not see people of african descent as equal. I can understand that position at that time because for hundreds of years, they were told that. It seems like people in a very unequal position as slave people. Its harder today to understand notions or ideas of racism because we are no longer in that moment. I cant explain or dont know what it is that keeps people tied to ideas that dont even have complete relevance today. I went to montgomery myself and even know i am a historian, i was very stirred and moved by the museum and the monument. I teach a class on the civil war and in my class yesterday, we were just getting to the beginning to manassas and bull run. At the end of the class, i asked my students what they found most compelling about what we had talked about or new. One student said i never thought about death. I never thought about men losing their limbs and being injured and there being no other way to deal with it the chop it off. I never thought about what happened to enslaved people in 1861 at that particular moment. My students are hungry for knowledge about the past. I dont think they are unique. As historians, we have to do a better job. Lawyers and you all, because there is nothing we can do about the way you cite in your Court Decisions the way judges site the citation preferences that dont have to at all be relevant to the particular case at hand. Education remains fundamental and important. We certainly need to put more resources there. Thank you. I would be delighted to sit and listen to you all day but i want to be respectful of your time since weve promised that we will release you 11 minutes ago. I want to thank you again for your powerful presentations and to say to you i was very taken by your noting what Charles Sumner said about the reconstruction amendments making the federal government the custodian of freedom. It is the charge of the commission to evaluate how well the federal government fulfills that charge to be the custodian of freedom. For us to monitor the civil rights and report on the status today and professor, when you refer to the damage done by systems of power that tend to damage Human Dignity is important the reminder of how important that task is. Thank you for grounding us in history and reminding us of our charge going forward. Thank you very much. With that, this meeting is hereby adjourned at 3 13 eastern time. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] this is American History tv entry. For each weekend we feature programs exploring our nations past. American history tv is on cspan3 every weekend featuring museum tours, archival films and programs on the presidency. Here is a clip from a recent program. Finally, psychiatry. This is an interesting topic. With thell familiar term, shellshocked. Inadequate term to describe what was happening to these people, who came from largely rural environments and used to the client. Suddenly thrust into this shock on the front where you had this mechanized enemy destroying everything around you. How did psyche come to grips with that . Shellshocked, doctors originally the notion of military psychiatry. Prior to the war, notions of any kind of mental problems this continued during the first world war. In england alone, 3000 cases of cowardice. 342 were executed for. After these for it. Said this, the doctors many of these guys were suffering and they should not have been treated this way. That is getting ahead of ourselves. Book. S the title of my i was not really happy with it, but the publisher thought it was catchy. It describes any nervous condition brought on by flying. Fatigue and how killing people is never a good thing. Being with ahuman conscience, killing people is a game changer. The filesse and all of these pilots. You can watch this and other programs on our website, where all the video is archived. Next, the Richard Nixon president ial library and museum in yorba linda, california posted their annual compatriot region on september 11. Keynote speaker and morgan of norman mehta, former transportation secretary during the george w. Bush administration, talked about his role and grounding all planes immediate efiling test following the september 11 immediately following the september 11 terrorist attacks in new york and washington, d. C