Requiem for Reconstruction

Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation

Robert D. Bland

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781469691879, 9781469691862
• eBook ISBN: 9781469688756
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: Social Sciences

The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their place in a nation still grappling with the legacy of slavery. Often remembered as a period of failed progressive change that gave way to Jim Crow and second-class citizenship, Reconstruction’s tragic narrative has long overshadowed the resilience and agency of African Americans during this time.

Requiem for Reconstruction chronicles Reconstruction’s legacy by focusing on key Black figures such as South Carolina congressman Robert Smalls, Judge William Whipper, writer Frances Rollin, and others who shaped postbellum Black America. Robert D. Bland traces the impact of the Reconstruction generation—Black Americans born between 1840 and 1870 who saw Reconstruction as a defining political movement and worked to preserve its legacy by establishing a new set of historical practices such as formulating new archives, shaping local community counternarratives, using the Black press to inform national audiences about Southern Republican politics, and developing a framework to interpret the recent past’s connection to their present world. Set in South Carolina’s Lowcountry—a hub of Black freedom, landownership, and activism—this book shows how late nineteenth-century Black leaders, educators, and journalists built a powerful countermemory of Reconstruction, defying the dominant white narrative that sought to erase their contributions.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Half Title
• Introduction
• Part I The Making of the Lowcountry’s Rival Political World
• Chapter One A Great Movement in South Carolina
• Chapter Two A Multiple-Front Memory War Redemption and Remembering Reconstruction-Era Violence
• Chapter Three The Rise of the Black Seventh Racial Gerrymandering, Rival Geography, and the Struggle over the Republican Party’s Destiny in South Carolina
• Part II The Postbellum Public Sphere and the Production of Black Countermemory
• Chapter Four Reconstruction’s Last Congressman The Gilded Age Black Public Sphere and the Battle over Robert Smalls’s Legacy
• Chapter Five More Good from Nazareth The Lowcountry’s Long Reconstruction, Disfranchisement, and Archiving Countermemory at the Century’s End
• Part III The Afterlife of the Reconstruction Generation
• Chapter Six The Jim Crow Generation Black Teachers, the Industrial School Movement, and the Educational Battle over Reconstruction’s Legacy in the Segregated South
• Chapter Seven Requiem for Reconstruction The Great Migration, Interwar African American History, and the Afterlife of the Reconstruction Generation
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index