Nine Black Men

Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise - Higher Ground Audio

The episode explores the founding of Alabama State University by nine Black men during Reconstruction, highlighting their role in advancing education and democracy. It connects their efforts to broader movements for civi

Key takeaways

• Nine Black men founded Alabama State in 1867

Transcript preview

We are now in Washington, D.C. February 25th, 1870. A special dispatch goes out from the jam-packed galleries of Congress. Mr. Revels, the colored senator from Mississippi, was sworn in and admitted to his seat this afternoon at 4.40 o'clock. As Revels approached the speaker's desk to take his oath, the galleries rose to their feet, quote, that they might miss no word. or lose no glimpse of what was being enacted below. This dispatch published in the New York Times described the confirmation of the country's first ever black person to serve in Congress, Hiram Revels. The United States is still in the aftershocks of the Civil War, but changing quickly. It's been five years since the Confederacy surrendered. The Union's top general, Ulysses Grant, is now the President. man from his predecessor, the southerner Andrew Johnson. Grant supports the radical reconstruction agenda. That includes full citizenship for all people born in the United States and full enfranchisement for men. Congress has just passed the 15th amendment to the Constitution prohibiting states from denying any man the right to vote, quote, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. office during reconstruction, 16 in Congress and the rest in state and local offices. They entered the roles of people who governed daily life in the South. They became magistrates and tax assessors, county sheriffs, and state lawmakers. It's hard to overstate what a massive change this marked in the life of the United States, or what a massive job these newly elected black officeholders had in front of them. After the Civil War, the South needed to be reimagined. It needed to become, for the first time really, a democratic society. Everything needed to be rethought. And when I spoke with President Barack Obama, he wanted to talk about perhaps the biggest priority for many new black officials, schools. One of the things I love when you read about reconstruction is how much black folks understood literacy and education as interglacial reconstruction is how much black folks understood literacy and education as inter-league. tied to freedom. The degree to which they thought our number one project here is let's start a bunch of schools to make sure that our people have a chance to learn how to read and write. It's the one thing that the white majority couldn't constrain. Learning. Yeah. Can't block that. We can lock this in our heads and they understood that but it also influences generally this notion. that then carries over to the broader society of public education that citizenship equality power all of that is tied to our ability to to understand and communicate and analyze the societies that we're in that that's what gives us agency and that's what gives us power And this is Reconstruction, the unfinished promise. One thing I've been very fortunate to do in my life is travel, political events, music festivals, and of course big sporting events. It really never gets less exciting. In my position as executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coates, and of course big sporting events. It really never gets less exciting. In my position as executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. each year I attend our convention at the final four. The hardest part is always finding a place that actually feels like home in the middle of all that energy. And that's why hosting on Airbnb makes so much sense, especially when something big is happening in your area. You've got people coming in who don't just want a place to crash. They want to feel like they're a part of the neighborhood, even if it's for just a few days. 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Ground news gives each outlet a factuality rating based on how careful its language is and how quickly it corrects it some stakes. So the version your reading has a track record attached. I am really interested in this feature because it shows how our language itself can influence our perspective of an event. So go to Ground News.com slash R-D-C. That's G-O-U-N-E-W-S. dot com slash R-C. for 40% off the unlimited access vantage plan. Get it for yourself or gifted to someone who hates missing the real story. Use my link, Ground News.com slash R-Dash C, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you value this show, you'll value what they're doing. One more time, Ground News.com slash R-C. that punished enslaved people for reading and writing and punished white people for teaching them. As President Obama says, this left black people after the Civil War all the more determined to get a formal education. And just as they did with voting and running for office, they did not wait to start their own schools, even if they could not read or write themselves. These schools are the ultimate story of resistance. Some would eventually become what we now call, black colleges and universities or HBCUs. But exactly how did the schools first get established? Each of them has its own story and these stories are dramatic with twists and turns that take a lot of detective work to follow. This is the kind of research that is especially suited for a scholar of black resistance movements. Enter Kelly Carter Jackson. ahead looks like a slide and a like a wrist watch or I have no idea I know. Jackson is chair of Africana studies at Wellesley College. She's standing in Montgomery Alabama with a local historian a man named Joseph Kaver. Here is the memorial, she's standing in Montgomery, Alabama with a local historian a man named Joseph Kaver. Here is the memorial, the Centennial Memorial, Wow. Kaver is a graduate of Alabama State. He was on campus when a school erected its centennial memorial in 1974. The memorial is a big metal structure in the middle of campus. It looks like a giant looped ribbon. And you can see the tributes around. The tributes are small plaques laid in the ground. Each engraved with the names of important people in the school's history. William Burns-Patterson-Harpur Council. These are the President. Wow. It's a lovely tribute, but it's incomplete. Alabama State was one of the first schools created to educate freed black people during reconstruction. And like so much of reconstruction, the particulars of the school's early history were, until recently, just forgotten. It's not totally clear why or how the school lost track of its origin story. Joseph Kaver started digging into his alma mater's past, he discovered something really interesting. In a story of this one school, you can see what Barack Obama pointed out to me, the way education became a fulcrum for democracy in the South, and