How Are We Honoring the Memory of Reconstruction?
by Adam Arenson
9-27-15
... The Civil War sesquicentennial was marked by four years of military reenactments, exhibitions, and a trove of new Civil War books ... Unsurprisingly, no flood of such Reconstruction sesquicentennial events and observances followed in its wake ...
And yet this summer’s events have shown the ongoing relevance of Reconstruction’s conflicts. And, unwittingly, a Reconstruction reenactment of a sort seems underway: a white supremacist terrorist massacres worshippers at a historic African American church, and the suspicious burning of other churches follow; state and national leaders are moved to act against symbols of the Confederacy, and a conversation about the origins and legacies of the Confederate secession engage the nation. Add in the ongoing debates about which U.S. residents deserve to be citizens, the fiery rhetoric about judicial activism, and the denunciations of the president for creating expansive new realms of government action in the name of equality and opportunity, and it could easily be the script of a Reconstruction reenactment ...
What can we do this time around, to make the unbidden reenactment of Reconstruction be a force for good in the contemporary United States? The best elements of the original Reconstruction period were a firm commitment to equal opportunities for American citizens in education, property ownership, and political participation, and a national commitment to building new infrastructure (in their case, the transcontinental railroad). Reconstruction’s greatest failures were the overpowering of these equality measures by racist violence, by selfish and racist politics and, in the decades that followed, a tremendous concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
All of these issues are already on the table today ...
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160593