A Talk to Teachers

Baldwin describes the Reconstruction Era as “a bargain between the North and South to this effect: ‘We’ve liberated them from the land—and delivered them to the bosses’” (Paragraph 10). He is assessing the era as a time filled with duplicitous bargains, where the most vulnerable citizens—in this case the newly-freed enslaved people—do not emerge from the Civil War unscathed. Officially, the Reconstruction Era stretched from 1863 to 1877 and was marked by the passing of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and the elections of Black legislatures. However, there are many myths regarding the Reconstruction Era that make it seem as though it was more successful than it was (Loewen). Some believe that African Americans skillfully and easily obliterated centuries of white oppression by dispossessing white citizenry at the highest levels of government. Baldwin believes this type of propaganda and misinformation is what educators need to contest in order to ensure that teaching history fulfills its obligations to every citizen.