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Black History Month Focus:

Reconstruction

Historical connections to Reconstruction surround us today: the growing Movement for Black Lives, rising white supremacist violence, virulent voter suppression, multiracial movements to address policing and labor, political efforts to ban controversial topics from classrooms, and racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality rates.

As these recent events have reinforced Reconstruction’s relevance, they have also heightened the need to interrogate why it remains so poorly understood.

Our Zinn Education Project (with Rethinking Schools) recently released a report to understand Reconstruction’s place in state social studies standards across the United States, examine the nature and extent of the barriers to teaching effective Reconstruction history, and make focused recommendations for improvement.

Read Report

As a companion resource for the report,

Social Justice Books offers a collection below of recommended

books for K-12 and background reading on Reconstruction.

Black Was the Ink

"Learning about the Mother Emanuel Church’s long legacy of involvement in the Black freedom struggle inspired me to write a story that linked together the efforts of Black people across generations to achieve equality in America. . . . Suddenly, the link from slavery, to Reconstruction, to Jim Crow, to the civil rights movement, to present-day racial injustices, crystallized for me, and Black Was the Ink was born. The more I learned about the Reconstruction era, the more similarities I saw between that period and the present." — author Michelle Coles discusses the inspiration for Black Was the Ink at The Brown Bookshelf.

Sugar

Growing up on a plantation during Reconstruction with her grandparents, 10-year-old Sugar is inquisitive and adventurous. So when Chinese workers are brought in chains for the harvest, Sugar is determined to figure out where they came from and to befriend them. She has to overcome not only the barriers of language and culture, but also the concerns of the older African Americans, who wonder if these new, younger workers threaten their meager yet vital employment. Read more about Sugar, by Jewell Parker Rhodes.