Reconstruction shows how, in just a few years, a series of stunning events -- the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fourteenth Amendment granting ex-slaves citizenship in 1868, the enfranchisement of blacks the following year -- reversed centuries-old patterns of race relations in America. People who for generations had been the property of others were now free to run their own lives. The whole Southern world was turned upside down. And yet, despite these challenges and terrible racial violence in this period, so much was accomplished. Reconstruction brought public schools to the South for the first time. Black Southerners were elected to local and national offices. And the nation committed itself to equality under the law for all Americans, regardless of race, by passing the Fourteenth Amendment. Reconstruction laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, and the foundation for the American society we live in today.
Director/Producers: Llewellyn M. Smith, Elizabeth Deane, Patricia Garcia Rios
Producers: Lillian Baulding, Cathleen O'Connell
Production Company
WGBH Educational Foundation
Release Date
January 1, 2004