The Importance of Teaching Reconstruction and the Law Today
The third webinar will discuss how learning about and teaching Reconstruction provides Americans with a new and necessary perspective of the U.S. Constitution.
Streamed live on March 5, 2025
Speakers:
Sheryll Cashin – Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice, Georgetown Law
Etienne Toussaint – Associate Professor of Law, University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law
Lucien Ferguson – Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School
Moderator: Barrett Holmes Pitner – Philosopher, Journalist, Educator; Author, The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America
This conversation emphasized how Reconstruction represented America’s first attempt to build a multiracial democracy, enshrining principles of equality and federal enforcement through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Despite its achievements in areas like voting rights and public education, Reconstruction was systematically dismantled by Supreme Court rulings such as Plessy v. Ferguson, violent backlash, and federal abandonment, leaving a legacy of unfinished work. Today, it is important to learn about and teach Reconstruction in order to understand the social and structural tensions that arise when working to create a more equitable and just American society.
Highlights:
Highlighting the fact that “equal protection under the law” did not exist in the U.S. Constitution until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.
Curriculum gaps in law schools and K-12 education obscure Reconstruction’s more radical achievements such as biracial legislatures and progressive taxation
Solutions → use graphic novels such as Defiant: Robert Smalls and stories of Black and white allies like Robert Smalls (Black legislator) and Albion Tourgée (white lawyer)
Myths like the one that Reconstruction failed due to Black incompetence, persist in textbooks and should be countered with data on Black legislator’s achievements from the time period
Support movement lawyering → lawyers should partner with communities and grassroots groups, echoing Reconstruction-era advocacy through institutions like the Freedmen’s Bureau