In short
A conversation about Reconstruction after the Civil War—why it was both a radical attempt to expand democracy and a “necessary tragedy”—and how its unresolved conflicts still shape modern U.S. debates over voting rights, education, citizenship, and multiracial democracy.
Guests
President Barack Obama, former U.S. senator and president; Malcolm Gladwell, author and journalist known for narrative-driven analysis of history and ideas.
Key claims
Reconstruction tried to “perfect the Union” by using constitutional amendments and federal action to extend citizenship and equal rights, but it failed to fully change Southern “hearts and minds.” The Compromise of 1877 functioned as a “true peace treaty” that ended federal enforcement and left Black people vulnerable. The backlash was enabled by myths (e.g., Lost Cause, Birth of a Nation) that justified a caste system. Progress is real but incomplete; hypocrisy can be a sign of movement.
Notable examples
Frederick Douglass; the Dred Scott decision; black “codes” and postwar Confederate laws blocking trades, contracts, testimony, and jury service; the Freedmen’s Bureau and public schooling; Obama’s 2004 Senate election as a signal for more Black representation.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOReconstruction's Impact on America
2:02 to 2:51
Exploration of the significance of Reconstruction in American history.
“Was Reconstruction America's greatest missed opportunity?”
The Complex Legacy of Reconstruction
2:51 to 8:11
Discussion on how Reconstruction attempted to redefine democracy and its challenges.
“on Audible or wherever you get podcasts.”
The Struggle for Multiracial Democracy
8:11 to 14:00
Examination of the difficulties in achieving a multiracial democracy post-Civil War.
“The reason Reconstruction is such a fascinating story is here's a moment, the first real moment since the founding, in which this idea of perfecting the Union is attempted in a fairly significant way.”
Reconstruction: A Necessary Tragedy
14:00 to 26:25
Exploring the complexities and consequences of Reconstruction in the U.S.
“We're entirely rewriting the rules of your relationship between a group of people, which, by the way, we think of as a minority.”
The Compromise of 1877 and Its Implications
28:38 to 38:43
Explore the psychological and political complexities surrounding the Compromise of 1877.
“And then after 12 years passed, you're like, well, kind of shrug, let's just...”
Reconstruction and Modern Democracy
38:44 to 42:00
Discuss the relevance of Reconstruction in today's societal context and ongoing debates.
“How do we make sure that the Freedmen Bureau efforts stick?”
The Ongoing Relevance of Reconstruction
42:00 to 48:24
Explore how the issues from Reconstruction continue to affect modern America.
“individuals and how much of it is determined by just technological trends or societal trends that we have no control over.”
Education and Empowerment Post-Reconstruction
48:24 to 55:34
Discover the significance of education in achieving freedom and empowerment for freed people.
“And, you know, that is better than not even being able to, even thinking about the idea that maybe you're doing something wrong.”
The Political Landscape for Black Americans
55:34 to 56:03
Analyze the historical and current representation of Black Americans in politics.
“devalue education, the degree to which you start getting an anti-intellectualism in our culture, in our politics.”
The Legacy of Reconstruction and Political Representation
56:03 to 1:05:23
Explore how the Reconstruction era laid the groundwork for African American political representation and the ongoing struggle for equality.
“why that is contrary to citizenship and equality and power.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. When the internet arrived, most people used it to look things up. Others saw what it could really do. The same is true with ChatGPT. ChatGPT work goes beyond answering questions. Give it a goal, plus things like notes, files, feedback, data, or project plans, and it can help create a brief, analysis, deck outline, tracker, or workflow. You stay in control, reviewing the work and choosing the final result. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.
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2:02Was Reconstruction America's greatest missed opportunity? Or the beginning of a story that's still being written? When we were making Reconstruction the unfinished promise, I sat down with President Barack Obama when we had a conversation about the period after the Civil War, exploring why Reconstruction remains one of the most misunderstood chapters in American history. From Frederick Douglass and the Compromise of 1877, to voting rights, public education, and today's debates over democracy, the series examines how the past continues to echo in the present. It's a conversation about history, progress, and why democracy is never a finished project.
2:46I hope you enjoy it and find it as interesting and as prescient as I did. You can find the full series, Reconstruction, The Unfinished Promise, on Audible or wherever you get podcasts.
3:09But Reconstruction is a slightly, it's not a tentative step. It is one step forward and then one like... A really big step back. A couple steps back. A couple steps back. And it's the amount of violence and it's like, it's almost a second civil war. What you see in the backlash to Reconstruction is the degree to which you never changed hearts in. minds coming out of the Civil War.
3:45One of the things that motivated this project was the people don't talk about, Reconstruction is the great forgotten era in American history, and I'm still puzzled as to why. Well, I don't think it's that puzzling.
3:59the mythology of America about us breaking away from the crown, declaring our independence, all men are created equal, the yeoman farmers, Walt Whitman, there's a whole narrative about who we are as Americans. And there's this inconvenient fact, which is that all this happened at the same time as you had an economy in the South based on slavery, chattel slavery. And a bloody war was fought to, in part, end slavery, maintain the Union. And then there was a reconciliation between North and South that essentially reinstated or preserved a caste system and a hierarchy that the country didn't want to acknowledge until really the second civil rights movement and the upheavals of the 60s.
5:15And so it's not surprising that the narratives that emerged in school books or in Hollywood movies were not focused on this glaring contradiction to how America understood itself and how it wanted to present itself to the world and also to its kids. Is there a moment when real, when does real democracy begin in America? Is that a fair question? It is a fair question. I think it's important not to undersell the achievements of the American Revolution. the declaration of independence a war against the crown the establishment of principles embodied in the bill of rights the notion of citizenship as opposed to you are a subject the notion of representative government as opposed to some hereditary monarchy or aristocracy, the breakup of a futile understanding of how societies are organized.
6:29That's a big deal. That's a seminal moment in human history. And the American Revolution helps to accomplish that. And so you have a pretty radical experiment from the start in terms of, is it possible for people to organize themselves and through some representative mechanism have a voice in their collective lives? But what is absolutely true is that it is a partial democracy. And it's not just because black people are not recognized as part of we the people. Women are just sort of the people because they don't get a chance to vote. Initially, men without property are not considered part of the decision-making process.
7:39you have a chamber, the Senate, in which there's no popular vote. And so there are a whole range of elements to what we would now consider to be a true democracy that are missing from that initial experiment. What makes Reconstruction so significant is out of the ashes of this horrific civil war. you amend the Constitution and you begin to rebuild and reorganize how democracy is supposed to function in ways that fill some of those holes, fill some of those gaps, start resolving some of those contradictions that were there from the very beginning. The reason Reconstruction is such a fascinating story is here's a moment, the first real moment since the founding, in which this idea of perfecting the Union is attempted in a fairly significant way.
9:04And it peters out. It doesn't get all the way there. But what it does is it leaves all these embers. It leaves all these ideas and possibilities and points in certain directions that then allow future generations to draw on and inspires others. And it gives us a sense of how this process of perfecting the union, of creating a true democracy, is not this static project where, okay, we got the words on the page, now it's done, but is rather this continuous exercise. It makes me think sometimes that our expectations are too high. Like I remember having a conversation with someone about segregation, but how the first generation and second generation results from integrating schools are disappointing.
10:10And there's one answer, which is to sort of wring your hands. The other answer is, well, why would you expect it to get better in 30 years? Why shouldn't we be asking these questions in 75 years? Like these things take time, right? Maybe we should be interested in how the children and grandchildren of the people who first went to integrated schools, how they fare. I think you are exactly right. That there is a way to look at Reconstruction that is shocked and despairing. And you say, oh, look what happens. You have this moment in which America might have gotten it all right, and then suddenly it all went to hell.
11:08And from our vantage point, that is the way I obviously see it. That's how you feel it, right? The incapacity for people in the South, white people in the South, essentially to embrace this new possibility of a multiracial democracy. On the other hand, what we know of humans everywhere, what we know of human history, is that this idea that a group of people have been utterly defeated in a savage, bloody war. and their entire lives have been upended and their conceptions of themselves and their status and their role in the world has been shattered. And the notion that they would suddenly go, oh, okay.
12:09And that this would be an easy process that you could complete in 10 or 15 or 20 years well, that defies everything we know about people. And so what is remarkable to some degree when I look at Reconstruction is how radical the experiment was. The fact that you had essentially a northern occupying army backed by radical Republicans in Congress who are willing to consistently override the racist sentiments of Johnson, the president, and push through legislation and constitutional amendments that offer the promise of citizenship and equal rights to people who just three or four or five years earlier were slaves.
13:27Or if they were freedmen, according to the Supreme Court under Dred Scott, did not enjoy any rights that white people were bound to respect. You have the highest court in the land just a few years earlier saying black people in America have no rights that the courts or white people generally are bound to respect. And now suddenly you have a victorious union that is trying to impose on a big chunk of the population. We're entirely rewriting the rules of your relationship between a group of people, which, by the way, we think of as a minority. with respect to the entire U.S. population, but in places like Mississippi and South Carolina, we're a majority.
14:35And throughout the South, constituted 35, 40 % of the population, and white folks are sitting there. They're aware how badly these people have been treated. They're aware of what they've done to them. They're harboring memories of the cruelties that have been perpetrated on these folks. And now suddenly they're seeing them in Congress and they're seeing them open up stores and they're on the streets. And so in that sense, I actually always think of Reconstruction as, yes, a tragedy, but also a hopeful sign. A necessary tragedy. A necessary tragedy and one that, of course, it wasn't finished. Of course, it wasn't completed.
15:37It was inevitable that there was going to be this massive backlash and a violent one. And that in turn, you'd then see an ongoing struggle that would continue for decades. Is there a case to be made that the intensity and the regularity of the backlashes that we see in American politics is something distinctive to our political culture and social culture? I would say that there is, there's been a lack of a full reckoning in the United States that makes these issues come up again and again and again. and that some societies at least have done a better job in looking at their past and saying that that did not work.
16:41And a national consensus is then built around, let's not do that again.
16:51as Du Bois said the issue of the 20th century he said at the time was the color line turns out the issue of the 21st century is also the color line probably 22nd century it may be I don't know that it I wouldn't say though that it's unique to the United States I mean, if you think about the experience of Indian democracy and, you know, you have partition and millions are killed and Muslims and Hindus in India are trying to figure out how to deal with this stuff. And now you have a rise of Hindu nationalism and struggles around that, issues that once you thought were resolved in India. You look at Northern Ireland.
17:51The Good Friday agreements have held. But anytime you visit there, it's always interesting as an African-American to visit a place like Northern Ireland. and you listen to the degree of segregation and continued bitterness, anger, suspicion between people that, to our eyes, look exactly the same. They're living in an area the size of, it's like tiny. Yes, but the now self-imposed segregation that remains is as powerful as anything we would see here. And it's hard to understand, right? Because it's not part of us. There's a difference between, in that case, what you have are tentative steps. So you would say in Northern Ireland, there's no question that the country is much better off today than it was in 1975.
18:53Well, as we would say about the United States, there's no question that you and I sitting here having a conversation about Reconstruction would not have been happening in 1880. But Reconstruction is not a tentative step. It is one step forward and then one like— A really big step back. A couple steps back. A couple steps back. The intensity of that is what's so—and it's the amount of violence, and it's like it's almost a second civil war. Well, it is the, what you see in the backlash to Reconstruction is the degree to which you never changed hearts and minds coming out of the Civil War. There wasn't this sort of not just defeat militarily, but also a restructuring of the understanding that Southern whites had about what their privileges and rights were and how their society should be organized.
20:09And so they effectively retreated for a while, and then they waited out the federal government and waited until the occupation ended, essentially. And then they reconstituted a version of their society that they preferred. And this is where the role of history comes in, how Reconstruction was depicted, the stories that were told in school books and in Birth of a Nation about how terrible these ignorant black people suddenly taken over government. and assaulting our women and running down our economies and how we wrested it back. The whole lost cause mythology, which we're even now still reckoning with because you have all these monuments to the valor of the Confederate soldiers, There's, you know, the romance of Gone with the Wind.
21:36These are all things that we grew up in, but it had to do with a very specific cultural project, right? Which was to justify, solidify, rationalize the maintenance of a caste system. And that never fully went away. Yeah. I wonder, this is going to seem like a trivial suggestion, but I feel there's great importance to these symbolic things. Part of the problem is we say that the Civil War ended with, we mark the end of the Civil War with the end of the initial military phase. Really, the Civil War ends in 1877 with the collapse of Reconstruction. If we thought about the war that way, then we understand it very differently.
22:25Right, because essentially what you have is an armistice. Essentially what you have is in 1877 with the Compromise that year, that's the real peace treaty between North and South. Yeah. And the North essentially says, okay, you guys are readmitted and fully redeemed. The union's been saved. The initial project that Lincoln called for when he started, when he initiated the Civil War in the face of succession. That problem's been solved. Technically, slavery no longer exists. The 13th Amendment survives. and otherwise we're back to you guys running things how you want down there and we'll run things how we want up here and and that was the the true peace treaty and it obviously left black folks in the south extraordinarily vulnerable and in part prompted the great migration and, uh, and, and it shaped, uh, you know, our history, but you're absolutely right that, that, that what it, what it did was to allow for this obfuscation, this, this, this erasure of, um, what the stakes were and what the possibilities But that's how our culture was structured, as I said, to justify, to reconcile this glaring contradiction at the heart of our self-conception.
24:31And the degree to which these really hard questions were never fully processed, I think accounts for the reason why you can still get these fierce episodes of backlash. because they've never really been talked about, surfaced, resolved. There hasn't been both acknowledgement and accountability, which means there also hasn't been the possibilities of forgiveness and reconciliation. It all just washes around. Yeah.
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28:34See what Optum's up to at Optum.com. the compromise of 1877 i mean it's such a pontious pilot moment and it makes me wonder about the the the the kind of psychology of the compromisers i mean it's weird because you just went through a dozen years ago this unbelievably bloody conflict i mean you you sacrificed hundreds of thousands of your countrymen's lives. You devastated the entire country. And then after 12 years passed, you're like, well, kind of shrug, let's just... Never mind? Never mind. It's like a never mind moment. It's like they wash their hands and they say, you know, take... What does Pontius Paltz say?
29:23Take this from me? I've forgotten that. But like, I struggle to kind of understand what's going through the minds of those when they shrug. I think one of the things is important to understand, we tend to look at all these issues through the lens of race entirely.
29:54And the truth is, is that there are all these other factors that in the minds of these politicians at the time are just as important and as relevant. and their notions of states' rights, and there are notions of the limits and constraints on federal government power, and there are notions of commerce and money. And all these things are happening in the midst of a really wildly unregulated, fluctuating Wild West economic atmosphere. You're getting these huge depressions and massive unemployment. And there are debates about labor rights in the North as people are getting into factories. And there's agitation among workers for better working conditions and better wages.
31:05And so you have elites who have a whole host of interests, and some of them think how black people are being treated and how we restructure our democracy is of the highest priority. and other people are thinking, you know what? We need to stabilize the economy. And some are thinking, you know, I'm trying to build a railroad here and I need a deal with this other legislator. And some of them are thinking, we can't maintain taxes that are required in order for us to keep federal troops occupying these Confederate states in perpetuity because we have other expenses. And so for us, looking back, we're saying to ourselves, what other issue was relevant?
32:19But for them at the time, it was one of the issues that was relevant. And I think that part of what also makes the compromise of 1877 so bitter in some cases, certainly for African Americans when you know that history, is there is an echo across American history of at some point. Even whites who are sympathetic to the cause of equality and human rights, only being willing to carry out that principle so far. Yeah. Right? You know, going back to this question of how inadequately we have accounted for this period, if we're doing American history over again, not only do we say the Civil War ends in 1877, but Frederick Douglass is a founding father.
33:29He really is. He really is. No, I, you know, I, there is, and that's why it's so interesting to see today this contest over what is the dominant narrative of America. And, you know, you have an administration that is trying to change, you know, the plaques at national monuments. Like they don't have enough on their hands. Yeah, right. But it does speak to the power of stories. There are figures that, because they hold political office, because they are men, because they are white, because they are titans of industry, because they hold traditional stations that we understand have power, we think of them as the history makers.
34:38And you have all these people who may not have occupied formal positions of power who entirely shape or bend the course of our narrative. And this is why I think he belongs in that kind of pantheon of founding father, that he sees the best. Yes. And he also is clear-eyed about who we are and what we're capable of. And that's, if you read the Federalist Papers, that's what they are. They are, Madison is both, has a vision and he's also incredibly. Correct. He's aware of like, this thing could follow, you know, what's the favorite, what's the famous Ben Franklin? If we have a republic, if we can keep it.
35:28If we can keep it. Exactly. Same thing. This is a grand thing, but it's going to be hard. And that's what Douglas understands. And that sensibility is what we want in our leaders. And it is a sensibility that we want our kids to learn from history. At least I do. Right. And that is not some rosy eyed, you know, sanitized version of American history. But a clear eyed understanding of, yes, we we stole land. We took land from previous occupants. America was built on violence and subjugation. and chicanery and confidence men and shenanigans and corruption. But it is also this amazing expression of human possibility.
36:43It is... Thomas Jefferson, yes, he had slaves. And, not but, and. Yeah. He penned some of the most important words that were ever written in the annals of humanity. and being able to maintain those two ideas at the same time is what both can inspire you to keep going and make the world and the country better and not sink in despair, but also to understand the challenges and the persistence that will be required to overcome those challenges if you want to get to where we want to go. I want to go back to something that we skipped over that I've been thinking about as you were talking about. Is it useful at all to wonder about what the country looks like if Reconstruction had not been defeated?
Read the full transcript
37:52Was that even a possibility? I think you can imagine scenarios in which somebody other than Andrew Johnson is Lincoln's vice president. Either Lincoln doesn't get shot, Booth misses, or his vice president is somebody who is a wiser, more thoughtful leader. We should briefly pause on what a disaster Andrew Johnson—I mean, Andrew Johnson is like— He's terrible. He's like—it's really hard to find something like that. And there is some stiff competition of late. There is, just generally. But he's terrible, right? He just—he's petty. He's small-minded. He's a drunk. He is not particularly deft in handling his own party, the other party.
38:47And so he's a disaster. You can imagine a situation in which a better leader, a better statesman, is working with a Republican Congress, being more strategic about how are we going to institutionalize both the reconstruction legislation that's been passed? How do we make sure that the Freedmen Bureau efforts stick? How do we make sure that the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments are carried out effectively what can we compromise because we know there's going to be resistance down there what can't we compromise you can imagine somebody working that through in a way that you did not end up with a violent, brutal reinstitution of caste and the restrictions on black people's ability to just live their lives and the lynchings and the horrors of that era.
40:11And had that process been less violent, even if it wasn't as quick as from modern standards we would now judge, you know, let's say that there was enforcement, but there were still social codes about no racial mixing or we're not going to take on anti-miscegenation laws. You can picture something that ends up being more gradual, gentler, not perfect, but ushering in maybe quicker the kinds of changes that we would end up seeing come about in the 60s and the 70s. It would be less wrenching. But, you know, I mean, that's speculation. That's true about all of human history, right? I mean, there are all kinds of junctures and moments that we look at and say, if humans weren't so stupid or so venal or so greedy or so cowardly or ignorant, things could have been better.
41:22There is this thing that like, it is so often the case that at pivotal moments in history, we're blessed with extraordinary leaders, right? We have FDR during the Depression. England gets Churchill, you know, and we're like, in this era, we're two-thirds of the way there. We have Douglas. We have Lincoln. And things— And then, you know, the third leg of the stool is this— I mean, it is always, it is a classic example of this debate about history and how much of it is determined by amazing individuals and how much of it is determined by just technological trends or societal trends that we have no control over.
42:11And I think this is a pretty clear example that it's both. it makes a big difference that lincoln's not there post-war yeah there's no doubt how do you curious about how you think about this the the kind of general project of multiracial democracy now like we're you know the it's impossible to spend a lot of time thinking about reconstruction without reflecting on the present day right because these issues are well they're still there If somebody is asking why is it relevant to talk about Reconstruction, I have to describe for them the degree to which we're having the same arguments. The issues of how are we going to help the freed people who've been enslaved?
43:09What are we going to give them to allow them to have a go at life? What does real freedom mean? You trace that debate of 40 acres and a mule and public education, and you can trace it all the way through to debates about welfare and debates about now DEI. And, you know, do we as a society have an obligation to address past injustices that have been, you know, institutionalized or left a legacy of poverty? So we're having that argument. When you look at issues of state versus federal power and how do we protect the rights of all citizens, both against states that may be abusing the people who live there, but also against the federal government that at any point might decide it wants to bully people around.
44:15Those issues are still there. Obviously, more directly, we're having debates now about voting rights and you've got a Supreme Court that has systematically weakened the possibilities of enforcing voting rights in our democracy. And we have a politics now that to at least one of our major parties has been captured by politics that is not that subtle about suggesting that we the people means a certain kind of people. That when you have the vice president, the current vice president making a speech that is basically a blood and soil version of we the people. That, you know, it matters who your parents were and how long they've been here, despite him being married to a daughter of an immigrant himself.
45:23You know, that echoes then ideas about who can be a citizen, who belongs, who gets to make decisions. So all these issues are still being debated, sometimes not as bluntly and explicitly as they have in the past, but they're still there. And what I would say, though, is in the same way that we were talking earlier about the Constitution, you get that equal protection language in the Constitution. And it may not be observed, and we may be shocked and appalled by the gap between those words and the reality. And it may be frustrating that we have to file lawsuits to vindicate those words, but they still count.
46:22In that same way, I would argue that the progress that we've seen over your lifetime and mine in creating a multiracial democracy, that stuff sticks. And, you know, that's progress. And so I don't get cynical and look back. I don't subscribe to the idea that because this has always been a theme in America, because we will often be disappointed by how American society responds to racial discrimination and injustice. because at any moment, you know, that kind of caste thinking can flare up and be dangerous and violent and cruel.
47:34That doesn't mean that we don't have evidence of that better version of America. We have evidence of it. We've seen it. The example you gave is actually a lovely illustration of this. A hundred years ago, a vice president could not stand up and make a nativist argument if he was married to the daughter of an Indian immigrant. But today he can. So we move from malice to hypocrisy. That's progress. That is progress. Listen, hypocrisy is progress. It is. Because it means that you feel guilty enough to either lie to yourself or others. Yeah. And, you know, that is better than not even being able to, even thinking about the idea that maybe you're doing something wrong.
48:36Yeah. Yeah, my mother, you know, she used to always say, I think guilt's a highly underrated emotion. And if I tell you to do something, you mentioned earlier, the rule of parenting. If I tell you to do something and you know it's wrong and you hide it and then you kind of try to do it anyway, at least I know I've planted the seed. You've set the standard. And that's part of what, part of the reason why I don't deem Reconstruction this complete failure. And somebody like an Eric Foner, a great historian who resuscitated and re-evaluated this story that Reconstruction had been an utter failure.
49:23one of the important points he makes is all these seeds are planted and not all of them grow some of them are dormant for a very long time for for decades but uh both you and i and our kids have benefited from the the fruits of trees that were planted during reconstruction You were saying earlier that the Civil War doesn't end right in 1865. There continues to be resistance in the South. One of the best examples of something that was never taught in school were the black coats. And I always used to assign this when I was teaching constitutional law. I would actually, you can read them. They're still available.
50:19And you can see these laws that were passed by the Confederate states after having been defeated.
50:29And they give you a sense of the degree to which the entire possibility for freed slaves to live, survive, have a trade, work, was just completely blocked. Right. So they would essentially say, if you want to practice a trade, you know, you have to pay a$10 tax. If you. They would have vagrancy laws in them where they said, if you don't have a job and you're just hanging out listlessly, then we. The state has the right to put you to work on a field because you can't be a vagrant. black folks can't practice a trade. They can't enter into contracts. Obviously, you can't serve as a witness, and you certainly can't serve on a jury.
51:30So what happens is that
51:36the ability of these so-called freed people to function in any way, To not be entirely vulnerable to the old system is completely blocked. And the reason I guess that's important is just you were asking earlier about how does things like the Compromise of 1877 happen. We so underestimate, I think, look, I'm not a materialist. I think ideas other than money and commerce matter, but the degree to which the economic underpinnings of the entire Southern economy had been based on slave labor and the desperation with which elites even post-war are thinking, if we don't get that back,
52:41then the source of all of our wealth, economic power, status will be undermined. That, I think, is something that oftentimes doesn't get talked about enough. So that was one thing I wanted to say. And then the other thing I touched on, but I just want to emphasize, one of the things I love when you read about Reconstruction is these narratives about teachers starting schools and how much black folks understood literacy and education as integrally tied to freedom. That if I can read, if I can write, If I can do my arithmetic, that unlocks for me freedom and power in ways that can't be taken away from me.
53:45and the project of starting public schools. And you see these, we were talking about all these black members of Congress and state legislatures, 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. And, you know, it becomes HBCUs. But it also influences generally this notion that then carries over to the broader society of public education.
54:35that citizenship, equality, power, all of that is tied to our ability to understand
54:53and communicate and analyze the societies that we're in. That's what gives us agency and that's what gives us power. And I think that's so important from my perspective, both to understand how much common sense these folks had coming out of subjugation. They were paying attention. They had good instincts about what it was that they should be striving for, what would make those words on paper real. That was powerful. And what it also reminds me is today, the degree to which not just the black community, but Americans generally will devalue education, the degree to which you start getting an anti-intellectualism in our culture, in our politics.
56:03why that is contrary to citizenship and equality and power. And, you know, you want young people to understand there's a reason why folks who had just been freed, they wanted land so they could, you know, grow their own crops and feed themselves. they also wanted to be able to read. And so, you know, that's something that now is available to all of us. Yeah. We should try it. And part of the Reconstruction Project is to populate politics with black people. Yeah. And when 100 some odd years later, you're the only black person in the Senate when you're first elected. Yeah, in 2004. 2004. And I'm still, at that point, I was the only African-American out of 100 senators in 2004.
57:04Yeah, so it gives you a sense of how these issues that you talk about during Reconstruction, they don't entirely get resolved, even by the modern civil rights movement, etc. Now, part of the Senate issue has to do with the inherent weirdness of our Senate system, right, where Wyoming gets two senators and California gets two senators, that it's not a portion based on population, right?
57:53But having said that, it's still pretty striking that I was one African-American. There were two Latinos in the U.S. Senate in 2005 when I was sworn in, 2006. Did you have the sense that it was, that your election would make it easier for others to follow or that this was a kind of, that you were a token? My election to the U.S. Senate, I thought that it would be significant because Illinois is probably the most representative of the country demographically. It sort of matches America's overall racial makeup and even regional makeup. It's urban, suburban, rural, north and south. Southern Illinois is closer to Kentucky than it is to Chicago.
59:02And so culturally are different. And so I thought that by me having been elected to the U.S. Senate from a big state that wasn't, that had the same percentage of black folks as the country in general, at least sent a signal to other candidates who might be thinking about running in other states that they could pull it off. And in fact, that's what happened. We started getting more African Americans in the U.S. Senate. I'm not suggesting that it wouldn't have happened anyway had it not, if it hadn't been me, it would have been somebody. But I think it's signaled to the political system, to donors and political operatives.
1:00:03Oh, just because if we have a talented black person, it turns out maybe they can win statewide. We don't have to assume that they can't win statewide or that they're a risky candidate. You know, we were talking, Edward Brooke from Massachusetts is the first post-Reconstruction. But he is a false start in a certain sense. He does not, you know, he's in the 70s. Yeah. And then nothing happens for... For a long time. For a long time. Yeah. Look, the truth is, is that the idea of not only African Americans representing, having representation in Congress. But the idea that African Americans could represent everybody, that takes a long time.
1:01:00That first step, right, which is the step that Reconstruction was about, was simply to say, can at least we be represented by some of our own? And you get this huge surge of black members of Congress and state legislatures and county commissions, et cetera. But that was always based on this notion that we deserve to have a voice. One of our own. Yeah. It takes a bigger leap to then say, by the way, I could actually represent white people too, and I could represent Latinos, and I have enough empathy and understanding, and we have enough common concern and interests and aspirations that they can trust me to look out for their interests also.
1:02:08that requires a whole nother set of social changes that we don't end up seeing until the modern civil rights movement and the breakdown of Jim Crow. It's funny because no one ever had, on the white side, ever had any trouble with the notion that a white person could represent everybody. The last thing you want to give up is this idea that someone can speak for everyone, right? It's a last bastion of privilege. Correct. Because now what you're really saying is that my story, my vision, my capacities are universal in some way. They're not qualified. There's no asterisk to them. And that takes some time, right?
1:03:03I mean, that requires social changes. It requires Jackie Robinson, and it requires Sidney Poitier, and it requires Jesse Owens, and it requires— John Bradley. John—exactly. My favorite. Yeah, you know, and it requires, you know, Jesse Jackson and John Lewis. And so you get this, over time, a change in social attitudes. And part of what I think we learn from Reconstruction, the cautionary part of that, is not assuming all that stuff is permanent and that the battle is won at any given moment, right? It is an ongoing, constant contest between narratives that are deeply rooted, and some of which are not unique to America, right?
1:04:17The idea of caste hierarchy, pecking order, status, That is not unique to America. Race is the dimension or the phenomenon around which our whole caste thinking gravitates. but it's not that's something that was in the apple that Adam and Eve ate that's part of our original sentence is this idea of we're separate we're better
1:04:57but I think if we're mindful of the fact that we have these warring ideas inside of us, in our cultures, in our politics, then we can choose a better story. That moment when you were elected to the Senate, maybe that's the moment that Frederick Douglass is like, I'm finally happy. Yeah, but then the fact that I was in the minority and I couldn't get any bills through the Senate because of the filibuster. Then you'd have to have a whole conversation about how this mechanism called the filibuster, which was primarily used for defeating civil rights legislation and anti-lynching legislation and was the mechanism whereby Southern Democrats, Dixiecrats were able to keep Jim Crow in place.
1:06:07how that became this honored, venerable tradition in the Senate that blocks all kinds of progressive legislation. There's got to be a point. Poor Frederick is over 200 years old at this point. He just wants to get on with his life. He wants to go eat his applesauce. Yeah, he wants. So maybe that's the moment he was like, okay, all right, all right. I'll take it. I'll take it. Yeah.
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From the publisher
Malcolm sat down with President Barack Obama while making Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise for a conversation about history, progress, and why democracy is never a finished project. What makes Reconstruction one of the most misunderstood eras in American history, and why does it still have so much relevance today? Today, we’re sharing an extended version of their conversation.
You can find the full series, Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise, on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
