The twelve-year federal effort to reintegrate the Confederate states, abolish chattel slavery in practice, and enshrine Black citizenship via the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The period produced the first Black members of Congress, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and integrated state legislatures across the South — and was dismantled by paramilitary white violence (the Klan, Red Shirts, White League), the rise of the Black Codes, and the Compromise of 1877, which withdrew federal troops in exchange for the Hayes presidency. Reconstruction’s collapse seeded Jim Crow and a century of de jure segregation.

Why it’s been targeted

The Zinn Education Project’s “Teach Reconstruction Report” finds that Texas’s social-studies standards under HB 3979 / SB 3 reference neither the Black Codes, the Klan, nor sharecropping in their Reconstruction units, and never use the phrase “Jim Crow.” The 2024 Texas TEKS rewrite further compressed Reconstruction coverage; teachers told the Texas Tribune that Reconstruction is now “rushed through or skipped.” Florida’s Stop WOKE Act (HB 7, 2022) restricts framing in which present-day inequality stems from past state action.