View as Webpage

Blaming the demise of Reconstruction on its victims protects the myth of white national innocence, even in the face of the violence of the KKK, and was used to justify the racial fascism of the Jim Crow regime. 

The attacks on DEI are like the attacks on Black leadership during Reconstruction. They’re saying any Black person in power has gotten there because of these programs.

We’re seeing the exact same tactics again.

This is why we must teach the history of Reconstruction. We share here new resources including the audiogram from our class on the Freedman’s Bank, an interview about Freedom Was in Sight: A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region, and books for K–12. Find lessons, our national report, articles, and more at our Teach Reconstruction campaign.

Historian Justene Hill Edwards and Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian discussed Edwards’ book, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank, a comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors.

In the audiogram above, Edwards explains the promising beginnings of the Freedman’s Savings Bank for formerly enslaved people, their incredible economic power in the early years of Reconstruction, and the “chipping away at the bank’s benevolent foundations” that soon followed. In a profound betrayal of trust, white board members and politicians turned it from a savings bank for African Americans into an investment bank to serve white business partners, friends, and family of its white trustees.

Through this shift to investments and the economic depression known as the Panic of 1873, white financiers’ mismanagement and fraud caused the collapse of the Freedman’s Savings Bank in 1874. They lent and lost millions of dollars of freedpeoples’ deposited savings, devastating generations of African Americans and opening up an enormous racial wealth gap that endures today.

One of the perspectives you get from history is the knowledge that things do change and people and institutions do make a difference. The alternative, capitulating, is also never the better choice. — Kate Masur

Prentiss Charney fellow Jessica Rucker interviewed Teach Reconstruction advisor Kate Masur about her new book, Freedom Was in Sight: A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region. The beautifully illustrated graphic history is reader friendly for high school students and adults.

The Public Books interview is at the link below.

Teaching for Change’s Social Justice Books offers recommended titles for K–12 on Reconstruction.

Check out events hosted by the Zinn Education Project and our colleagues, including

• NEH 2025 Summer Institutes Application Deadline (March 5)
• King of the North: Martin Luther King’s Freedom Struggle Outside of the South with Jeanne Theoharis (March 24)
• SNCC & Grassroots Organizing at Claflin University (April 4)
• 5th Annual Teach Truth Day of Action (June 7)
• Teach Climate Network Summer Institute (July 14–17)
• and more.

You know what we face: Teachers are under attack for teaching truthfully about U.S. history. Please donate so that we can continue to offer free people’s history lessons and resources, and defend teachers’ right to use them.

COORDINATED BY:

PO BOX 73038, WASHINGTON, D.C. 20056 

202-588-7205 | zinnedproject.org