war effort, when the United States won, Democrats emerged as the minority
party. Republicans controlled Reconstruction. Like slavery, Reconstruction is a
subject on which textbooks have improved since the civil rights movement.
The earliest accounts, written even before Reconstruction ended, portrayed
Republican state governments struggling to govern fairly but confronted with
immense problems, not the least being violent resistance from racist ex-
Confederates. Textbooks written between about 1890 and the 1960s, however,
painted an unappealing portrait of oppressive Republican rule in the postwar
period, a picture that we might call the Confederate myth of Reconstruction.
For years black families kept the truth about Reconstruction alive. The aging
slaves whose stories were recorded by WPA writers in the 1930s remained
proud of blacks’ roles during Reconstruction. Some still remembered the
names of African Americans elected to office sixty years earlier. “I know folks
think the books tell the truth,” said an eighty-eight-year-old former slave, “but
they shore don’t.”^62 As those who knew Reconstruction from personal
experience died off, however, even in the black community the textbook view
took over.
My most memorable encounter with the Confederate myth of Reconstruction
came during a discussion with seventeen first-year students at Tougaloo
College, a predominantly black school in Mississippi, one afternoon in January
- I was about to launch into a unit on Reconstruction, and I needed to find
out what the students already knew. “What was Reconstruction?” I asked.
“What images come to your mind about that era?”The class consensus:
Reconstruction was the time when African Americans took over the governing
of the Southern states, including Mississippi. But they were too soon out of
slavery, so they messed up and reigned corruptly, and whites had to take back
control of the state governments.
I sat stunned. So many major misconceptions glared from that statement that
it was hard to know where to begin a rebuttal. African Americans never took
over the Southern states. All governors were white, and almost all legislatures
had white majorities throughout Reconstruction. African Americans did not
“mess up”; indeed, Mississippi enjoyed less corrupt government during
Reconstruction than in the decades immediately afterward. “Whites” did not
take back control of the state governments; rather, some white Democrats used
force and fraud to wrest control from biracial Republican coalitions.
For young African Americans to believe such a hurtful myth about their past