Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and Its Legacies [Hardcover]

The companion volume to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture exhibit, opening in September 2021

With a Foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Eric Foner and a preface by veteran museum director and historian Spencer Crew

An incisive and illuminating analysis of the enduring legacy of the post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction—a comprehensive story of Black Americans’ struggle for human rights and dignity and the failure of the nation to fulfill its promises of freedom, citizenship, and justice.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, millions of free and newly freed African Americans were determined to define themselves as equal citizens in a country without slavery—to own land, build secure families, and educate themselves and their children. Seeking to secure safety and justice, they successfully campaigned for civil and political rights, including the right to vote. Across an expanding America, Black politicians were elected to all levels of government, from city halls to state capitals to Washington, DC.

But those gains were short-lived. By the mid-1870s, the federal government stopped enforcing civil rights laws, allowing white supremacists to use suppression and violence to regain power in the Southern states. Black men, women, and children suffered racial terror, segregation, and discrimination that confined them to second-class citizenship, a system known as Jim Crow that endured for decades.  

More than a century has passed since the revolutionary political, social, and economic movement known as Reconstruction, yet its profound consequences reverberate in our lives today.Make Good the Promises explores five distinct yet intertwined legacies of Reconstruction—Liberation, Violence, Repair, Place, and Belief—to reveal their lasting impact on modern socilc