Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise

Comedian Wyatt Cenac considers how movies, cartoons, and even theme park rides have shaped our cultural memory of Reconstruction. Plus, President Obama joins Malcolm to discuss why our current world owes everything to this era and how Reconstruction provides a roadmap to a better future.
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Soon after Reconstruction began to wind down, American historians wrote the era off as a failure. But that narrative didn’t emerge by accident — it was engineered by a celebrated historian named William Dunning, whose denigration of Black civil rights dominated textbooks for decades. Journalist Jelani Cobb reveals why the “Dunning School” remained dominant until the 1930s, when scholars including W.E.B Du Bois and Eric Foner fought to restore Reconstruction’s legacy in the narrative of American history.
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Following one of the most contentious presidential elections in US history, representatives of the North and South met in a posh Washington DC hotel. The result of their backdoor dealings spelled the end of progressive efforts at Reconstruction and the beginning of a new era in the South: Jim Crow. President Obama and Malcolm dissect one of the most consequential compromises in American history.
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In 1874, with emancipation and Black citizenship finally written into the Constitution, Frederick Douglass set his sights on the next frontier of freedom: economic self-reliance. But in this pursuit, he was ensnared in a disastrous financial fraud by trusted white allies. Kai Wright shares the story of this scandal that handed Douglass’ enemies prime ammunition against interracial democracy.
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As Black citizens exercised newly won rights in America, a vigilante backlash shook the South. In response, Congress summoned more than 500 witnesses to testify about the violence they had experienced. Historian Kidada Williams takes us back in time to those seven extraordinary months — what became known as the “Klan hearings”— when lawmakers mounted the only official effort in US history to publicly confront postwar racial terror.
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