How One Agency Is Fixing American Amnesia About Reconstruction

A new initiative by the National Parks Service seeks to designate sites for their historic significance in the Reconstruction era. It's a bold and vital move for an agency that has only recently begun to seriously address the racial complexities of the Civil War.

During the restive years following the Civil War, the Era of Reconstruction—often referred to as the nation's Second Founding or the first Civil Rights Movement—America saw a virulent backlash from white supremacists in response to profound political, economic, and educational gains made by African Americans. During these years, more African Americans held office than at any other period in American history; in 2014 Tim Scott became the first African-American United States Senator elected in South Carolina since Reconstruction. Newly freed slaves established churches, schools, and businesses, and negotiated labor contracts with their former owners. Simultaneously, the period saw the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, which used violence to impose a race-based social order where law no longer did; black codes were created to suppress African-American freedom, and segregation was institutionalized. White supremacists lynched an average of two to three African Americans weekly.

In more recent years, a somewhat unlikely agency—the National Park Service—has stepped up to consider how and whether to mark this period by way of national historic sites. In July the NPS released a report, the product of two years of commissioned academic research, detailing what events and locations should be marked for their historic significance relative to the Reconstruction era. It is a call for communities to take the next step and erect markers, with the agency’s support. The NPS's ambition to have events of this era designated as National Historic Landmarks could have a great effect on the public's understanding of racism's pervasive roots in this country—a bold, and important, move for an agency that only recently began to take on the racial complexities of the Civil War.