(upbeat music) <v Announcer>Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps</v> Distinguished Speaker Series.

(audience applauding) <v ->Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.</v> My name is Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director.

Today brings us to the second installment of our winter program as we pause for a moment of post inaugural reflection, following one of our nation's most contentious presidential elections.

This conversation brings together filmmaker, scholar, and cultural critic, Henry Louis Gates Jr. With prominent historian, Eric Foner to contemplate how a divided nation comes together.

First off, I wanna thank our partners for making this program possible.

This event is part of the University of Michigan, Democracy and Debate Theme Semester, and the 2021 U of M Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Symposium.

With support from Wallace House and the Ford School of Public Policy.

And big thanks to our streaming partners, Detroit Public Television, and PBS Books.

For more information on this program and others to come, please visit pennystampsevents.org for the full lineup of the Penny Stamp series so you don't miss a thing.

Before we join our guests today, a few words of introduction on each.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University.

Dr. Gates is an author and filmmaker whose work includes the groundbreaking genealogy series, "Finding Your Roots", now in its sixth season on PBS, which has been called one of the deepest and wisest series ever on television.

Dr. Gates is the recipient of numerous awards.

And in 1998, he was the first African-American to receive the National Humanities Medal.

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University.

Is one of the country's most prominent historians.

Professor Foner's publications have concentrated on the intersections of intellectual, political and social history and the history of American race relations.

One of his best known books is "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution".

One of the Bancroft Prize, Parkman Prize and the LA Times book award.

To lead our conversation today, Lynette Clemetson, is the director of Wallace House, Knight-Wallace Fellowships and the Livingston Awards at the University of Michigan.

A long time journalist, she was a correspondent for Newsweek Magazine in the US and Asia.

A national correspondent for the New York Times, and a senior director of strategy and new initiatives at NPR.

Now I will turn it over to Lynette Clemetson to lead us forth.

<v ->Chrisstina, thank you so much for that warm welcome.</v> And Professor Eric Foner and Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Skip, it's so nice to have you here.

Skip, thank you so much for joining us.

<v ->Thanks for having me on the program.</v> <v ->And Eric it's wonderful to have you here.</v> <v ->I'm very happy to take part.</v> <v ->So we've got so much to cover in this conversation.</v> Let's just start by setting a scene.

We've got a hotly contested election.

The results are disputed.

There are threats of violence, there's actual violence.

There is a large vocal organized segment of the population that adamantly refuses to accept the results of the election.

The mood of the country is tense and there's a palpable sense that the very future of this experiment called the United States hangs in the balance.

So this all sounds very familiar but the election I'm talking about is the election of 1876.

So that's where we want the people who are joining us today to start this conversation with us.

In 1876, which feels like it could be this year, the time we're living in right now.

The election of course was between Rutherford B. Hayes as the Union Republican candidate and Samuel Tilden as the Southern Democratic candidate, representing the Southern Democrats who were trying to preserve their way of life and the institutions and economy as established through the institution of slavery.

So that's the election.

We're gonna come back and talk to it, but let's start by backing up to talk about the real roots of that tension.

This period in American history that we don't really talk about very much.

The period called reconstruction.

Eric Foner, you've written several books on reconstruction.

Let's start with you just telling us what is reconstruction and why should we care at all about it?

<v ->Well, reconstruction, you might say</v> is two different things.

One, it's a specific period of American history following the Civil War.

When it ended, it was some dispute among historians that the election that you mentioned 1876 to through 1877 is sometimes seen as the end of reconstruction.

Others date the end a little later but it's a particular time period like the new deal or the progressive era, something like that.

But secondly and perhaps more profoundly, it's a historical process.

The process of reuniting the nation after the bloodshed of the Civil War and trying to come to terms with the consequences of the destruction of slavery in this country.

The key issues of reconstruction revolved around the status of the 4 million emancipated slaves.

What was their status gonna be?

Were they gonna be citizens of the United States?

Would the men among them have the right to vote?

Would they have the same civil rights as white Americans?

That question doesn't have a specific timeframe attached to it.

And reconstruction is important among other reasons because we're still fighting over those issues of citizenship, of race relations, of access to voting rights, things like that.

So in a way, we're still living with the issues of reconstruction, which is why, as I know Skip Gates also agrees, it's very important for Americans today to really know something about that period.

<v ->And Skip, you felt it was so important</v> to make the conversation about reconstruction current that you created a film about it.

The first time I saw the two of you discussing reconstruction and why it was important, was in your PBS film that was released in 2019 that focused solely on reconstruction.

<v ->For me, reconstruction can be thought of as 12 years</v> of black freedom, followed by an alt-right rollback.

And I've always been intrigued by reconstruction.

But when I saw the rise of white supremacy, the alt-right rollback under Obama and manifesting itself with the election of Donald Trump, I knew that we had to make this film on reconstruction because it was a mirror.

It was a way for our fellow citizens to understand themselves and the forces that were fighting each other today in reaction to the presence of a black man at long last in the White House through the lens of the past.

And I also realized that the issues raised, the reason that they were manifesting themselves again was these issues crucial which had never been resolved in the reconstruction era.

So it wasn't as if reconstruction ends and everything's hunky-dory, it's just the opposite.

People tried to bury it.

I was filming in Ferris State University in Michigan.

They have the world's only Jim Crow museum.

And even then, Lynette and Eric, they had, not exactly a wing, but a whole section of the Jim Crow museum devoted to racist images of Barack Obama.

And I was so stunned because this is at the time when people were writing books about the end of race, the end of racism, that Barack and Michelle were new kinds of African-Americans as the normally very sober philosopher novelist, Charles Johnson wrote even when they were campaigning.

And it somehow, there occupancy in the White House, their election was going to signal a sea change in the history of race relations in America.

It did not as we now know.

<v ->As we now know.</v> <v ->I wanted to go back and understand why, what had happened?</v> <v ->Well, one of the things I appreciated about the film</v> is that I think in the popular imagination when we think of progress, as a country, we refer to the civil rights movement because it's more current in our memory and we have people who have lived it.

But I also think that it is an easy thing to grab because it is a time for which images exist.

There's video, there are pictures, there are visceral things that we can feel and touch.

And in your film about reconstruction, I had read about reconstruction, but you were able to make that period feel vibrant and alive.

And so I'd like to just share a clip that talks a bit about the sea change in our culture and the reaching for progress that reconstruction symbolized for us.

Let's watch a clip <v Announcer>In state houses across the south,</v> black men and white men were attempting to govern together for the first time.

In South Carolina, where African-Americans made up almost 60% of the population, voters elected a black majority House of Representatives.

<v ->It was the seat of black power USA.</v> The lieutenant governor, secretary of state, state treasurer.

<v ->Unimaginable--</v> <v ->Absolutely, yeah.</v> <v ->Many parts of the South</v> didn't have a educated and experienced black leadership ready to step into power which you did have in South Carolina.

It had a free black group before the Civil War in Charleston which was well-educated and politically articulate.

<v Robert>Behind us, lie 243 years of suffering,</v> anguish and degradation.

Before us, lies our mighty future.

That future is ours to shape.

(soft music) <v ->12 years after the end of the Civil War,</v> reconstruction was dealt with devastating blow.

You might even say it was overthrown.

The southern Democrats took their states back one by one.

<v ->The 1880s is a kind of a twilight zone</v> between reconstruction and the full implementation of the Jim Crow system.

Black people continue to vote in many parts of the South.

There was still violence against them, but there was still some black people holding office in many parts of the South.

Civil rights laws remained on the books.

<v ->One of the cruel ironies of reconstruction</v> is that black people could claim certain rights in the 1870s that they would have to fight to reclaim in the 1960s.

Thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, African-Americans were guaranteed equal access to hotels, restaurants, theaters and public transportation.

Those who were denied service could expect their rights to be upheld in a court of law.

But all that was about to change.

Lynette, one of the many things that I learned, I make films in a way to go back to graduate school.

It's a way I never left school.

I started the first grade on the last day of August, 1956, and I'm still in school.

But I'm able to go to graduate school by making films.

So I didn't know that much about reconstruction.

We never studied reconstruction.

We studied all of what we now call black history on one day in high school since, which we called Negro Day.

And it was slavery.

And the moral of slavery was, I went to an integrated school in Eastern West Virginia.

Brown V Board was '54.

Schools integrated in my County in '55.

God, I grew up in an Irish Italian paper mill town.

So the handful of black kids with all these white kids.

And whenever we'd had so-called Negro Day, the teacher would say, "The best thing ever happened to you kids was being taken out of Africa and slavery and brought to the new world."

And then the worst thing that ever happened was reconstruction, I would later learn.

That was part of the mythology.

But we did and we skipped from Lee surrendered at Appomattox to the civil rights movement, and everything else was alive.

But let me tell you that Willie Lee Rose wrote a book called "Rehearsal for Reconstruction" and it's about 40 acres in a mural really, and how it was taken away.

And I had to study that when I took my first black history course at Yale, but the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Acts, you could say they were rehearsal for the 14th and 15th Amendments.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 is still on the books.

It established birthright citizenship for the formerly enslaved.

And there were four reconstruction acts passed in 1867 and '68, but here's the punchline, black men in 10 of the 11 former Confederate States got the right to vote in the summer of 1867.

Got the right to register to vote.

So I think that this is the first freedom summer.

Now remember, the 15th amendments ratified in 1870.

This is three years before.

Now, that's ironic in two ways, first of all as Eric said, free black men could only vote in five of the six new England states, not in Connecticut.

And in New York, if they satisfied at $250 property requirement until the gratification of the 15th.

But the formerly enslaved and other free black men got the right to vote in 10 of the 11 Confederate States.

So the summer of, because of the Reconstruction Act and the summer of 1867, so this massive registration of black men to vote, and they registered 80%, it's estimated, of the black men eligible and registered to vote, registered to vote.

And most of these men who had been enslaved were illiterate because it was illegal to teach an enslaved person to read and write.

And Lynette, not only did they registered, 1868, they voted.

Ulysses S. Grant won overwhelmingly in the electoral college but he only won the popular vote by just over 300,000 votes.

500,000 black men casted their ballots.

And are sensibly for Ulysses S. Grant.

Now, hold that thought in mind and add it one more fact, there was a mini black republic in the United States.

South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana were in majority black states.

Florida, Alabama and Georgia were almost majority black states.

And this scared the daylights, not only out of the people of the former Confederacy obviously but I believe the people in the North as well.

<v ->It's hard to overstate just how contentious</v> the environment was in the country around the presidential election of 1876.

Let's just take a look at a clip from the Reconstruction film to put it all into context.

<v ->Election night is complete and utter confusion.</v> <v Narrator>Even though Tilden won the popular vote,</v> the results from Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana, where African-Americans faced severe, violent repression were undetermined.

<v ->Republicans invents Southern governments</v> to declare enough votes invalid, to swing the electoral college to haze.

<v ->The Democrats were so outraged by the fact</v> that Tilden was not declared the winner, that they began to rally their voters under the slogan, Tilden or Blood.

There were real fears of civil war.

Grant started to call in troops to guard Washington.

And he said, "Either party can afford to lose an election, but we as the people cannot afford to have a presidential election that is tainted by false or illegal results."

Congress created a bi-partisan commission.

The vet declared Hayes the winner by one vote.

<v ->Democrats predictably cried foul.</v> <v ->Hayes was referred to his brother Fraud B. Hayes.</v> He was called His Fraudulency.

<v ->February as inauguration day neared,</v> the election still remained undecided.

Republicans and Democrats came together and cut a deal.

Hayes is inaugurated as President of the United States.

<v ->After 750,000 people had died,</v> I hate to say the union (indistinct), and co-terminusly be to end human slavery in the United States.

It was easier to forgive the people who had declared war on the United States of America than to protect the rights of black people.

<v ->How do you think about the rise of white supremacy</v> during this era?

<v ->Well, of course, as Skip said,</v> there was a very violent white response in the South, particularly to the advent of significant black political power.

And that's one of the lessons of reconstruction I'm afraid but it's something we must learn and remember, which is that progress is not always in a straight line.

Rights can be gained and rights can also be taken away.

And that has happened in American history.

The constitutional amendments by around 1900 had been pretty much abrogated in the South.

And it wouldn't be until the civil rights era that they again were invigorated in the Southern states.

Even though they remained on the books, no one repealed them, but they were just not enforced.

And so, yes, we have to be very vigilant about protecting the rights we have.

Now, the other point and which takes us back to the series that Skip produced and do a lot of the scholarship that's been written is that this sort of mythology of reconstruction was a very important part of the legitimation of what we call the Jim Crow system in the South.

The idea that reconstruction was a terrible mistake.

It was a period of misgovernment of corruption.

And this was widely shared by around 1900 in the North as well as the South.

And it became the justification in the 20th century whenever people challenged the racial system of the South, they got the immediate response.

Well, if black people get the right to vote again, we'll just have all the horrors of reconstruction once again.

<v ->And Lynette,</v> a heinous film, "Birth of a Nation" which is taught in every history of film course, was just about the most racist film ever made.

And most people think that it was about the civil war.

It wasn't, it was about reconstruction.

It was about the evils of reconstruction, and it's basically set in South Carolina.

And the crucial scene is in the South Carolina legislature, why?

Because South Carolina had a majority black House of Representatives in 1868, speaker of the house, state treasure.

I have Jim Clyburn on camera.

<v ->Yes, it was Jim Clyburn in the clip that we played,</v> Congressman from South Carolina.

<v ->Yeah, and this was a nightmare.</v> South Carolina was so black metaphorically, that it was called negro country, even in the 18th century.

And as I said, black people outnumbered white people.

And so it was this, a mythology had to be created around the rise of black elected officials.

Well, the qualifications of or the quality we might say of the black vote.

Look, we have neglected to talk about the achievements of reconstruction.

16 black men between 1870 and 1877 are elected to the Congress, to the United States Senate.

And overall, 2000 black men.

And this is Eric statistic.

Eric is the person who established this but I'm just quoting him, were either elected or appointed to public office during reconstruction or very curiously, three of those 16 Congressmen were ministers.

I find that fascinating.

And 243 of the 2000 were ministers just to underscore the role of the black church.

But by 1901, the number of black men in Congress had been reduced to one.

And he gave his farewell speech and he said, "The negro like a phoenix will rise once again."

And it would not be until 1929 when Oscar De Priest was elected from Chicago.

And why was Oscar De Priest able to be elected in Chicago?

For two reasons, one, the great migration because black people from the South had moved to the cities and formed concentrated voting blocks.

And two, the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed their right to vote.

Now, how was it taken away if it was in the constitution?

How was the right to vote taken away?

They didn't pass the constitutional amendment to say, no negro male, and remember only men could vote, can vote, no, starting in 1890, each Southern, each former Confederate state, staring with Mississippi, rewrote their state constitution.

And they invented all of these confected really, all of these requirements which were specifically explicitly aimed to disenfranchise black men.

As in the book, I quote many of the congressmen, legislators, governors saying we're doing this to disenfranchise the negro.

They didn't even use the word negro.

<v ->It was a very, very successful wiping out of progress.</v> It was a very successful roll-back.

<v ->One statistic that I cite to audiences</v> which elicits gasps, in Louisiana, and before they pass their new state constitutional convention, there were 130,000 black men registered to vote.

By 1904, that number had been reduced precisely to 1,342.

And they were probably scared to death to even try to vote.

And final thing, I was struck by the most amazing thing about Joe Biden's inaugural address, was I believe Joe Biden became the first president elect to use the phrase white supremacy in his speech.

I couldn't believe it.

Now when I was growing up, I thought white supremacy was a term that had been invented by Orval Faubus and George Wallace.

But it wasn't.

It was actually according to Webster, it was first used in 1824, but it really became an ideology with a face.

<v ->Reconstruction.</v> <v ->Yes, in reconstruction.</v> It was the roll-back to reconstruction.

And that period was called redemption because they were supposedly redeeming the South.

So I think not only was Biden's speech interesting because he used the phrase white supremacy, some historians may one day see Biden's defeat of Trump as the roll-back of redemption.

The rollback of neo-redemption.

And to see the Trump administration as the attempt to redeem America from the reconstruction administration of Barack Obama.

Eric, do you agree?

Were you surprised when President Biden used the phrase white supremacy as something we're going to find?

<v ->No, I thought he was pretty candid about the need</v> for active measures to promote racial justice.

And I think it was a pretty powerful speech.

I was gonna just mention that even though as Skip has pointed out, reconstruction generated its own opposition often in a very violent way.

And eventually, the political rights that had been gained were stripped away.

But it's important to remember that not everything was taken away.

In other words, there were lasting consequences of reconstruction.

One is the real expansion of the African-American church.

For the first time, you had black educational institutions set up, certainly in the South, I mean in the North, there had been a few but you got the historically black colleges established during reconstruction.

You had the first public school systems ever in the Southern states for white as well as black pupils.

And that didn't go away although black education was certainly reduced considerably under redemption.

And black family life was transformed.

No longer could an owner separate families, send children away, spouses sold away from each other.

Slaves had families but they were always subject to disruption by the owner.

And these institutions, the church, the school, the family, are the kind of a springboard out of which the civil rights struggle arose.

<v ->These threads are undercurrents</v> that run under our society and have us in this constant push-pull of progress around these very fundamental questions of rights equality, and what we mean by who is American and who is owed the full manifestation of liberty as is the promise laid out in the promise of the country?

And it was interesting and chilling the insurrection at the US Capitol.

One of the images and there were so many images of that time, but one of the images that is referred to, we've seen it played over and over again, is the man walking through the Capitol carrying the Confederate flag.

And people made mention that even the Confederate soldiers were not able to ever get that flag inside the Capitol.

It happened for the first time on January 6th, 2021.

And so when you think about that image, Eric, what does it say about where we are currently in this push and pull, this struggle for who we want to be as a country?

<v ->You know, in the last few weeks, we have seen this,</v> I don't know how to put it, history and the present coming together in all sorts of dramatic ways.

The very fact that as you mentioned, on January 6th, we had this mob invasion of the Capitol of course, that was also the day that the two elections in Georgia was certified, a black man and a Jewish man.

Anyone who knows the history of Georgia is gonna know that that's a pretty remarkable thing.

The long history of racism, slavery, racism and antisemitism.

But what does this mean?

You ask Lynnette.

I mean, I'm probably a little more optimistic than Skip.

I don't wanna put words in his mouth.

That we've been on a number of occasions and conversations about this kind of thing.

Oh, one other thing that happened on the 6th, that was the day or rather, that the Mississippi legislature approved the new state flag of Mississippi.

He removes the Confederate symbol from it, it's now some kind of pine tree or something.

But it no longer has a Confederate battles inbuilt in the flag.

So I guess what I take from all this, yes, the mob, the white supremacy, the Confederate flag, all that is horrifying and showed you that the issues of the Civil War are still going on.

But on the other hand, the election, the flag it shows you that people can change and that progress is possible.

And if we're gonna take one thing from reconstruction is the necessity of vigilance about progress and others.

We can't just sit back and say, okay, we've achieved this, let's just relax because as we know, progress can be reversed also.

But that doesn't mean it can't happen.

<v ->When it comes to the history of reconstruction,</v> is the glass half empty or half full?

Foner-- <v ->Or both.</v> <v ->Or both.</v> Foner would say one thing, I would say another, which is why we were great team in my opinion as the producers of the film.

For me, Eric has done so much to establish black achievement under reconstruction.

And that's so very important.

I don't like attributing things to my ethnicity or even to my gender.

But I think maybe because I'm a black man, I don't know.

It makes me always worrying about protecting the rights that we have gained, because as Eric often says, rights that have been earned are never permanent.

That's when to lessen reconstruction.

Rights that we think are permanent can be taken away.

And Lynette, you'll remember, and Eric, I know, you know, the amount of anxiety among African-Americans (indistinct) African-American something terrible was gonna happen to Barack Obama.

There've been so many times when we've been so close.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

John Kennedy was being pushed by Martin Luther King to do the right thing.

And they end up dead.

Barack Obama has eight glorious years in the White House followed by Donald Trump.

Whatever historians say about Barack Obama, Donald Trump made Barack looked like Abraham Lincoln.

I mean, that was the best thing that happened to Barack Obama's historical legacy is having Donald Trump as his successor.

But I wanted to, that's why we devoted equal time to the achievements of reconstruction.

And then how it was dismantled?

Because I want us to study, how did they dismantle it?

How did they take away?

Every time we take two steps forward as black people, we had to knock back one step, and I'm tired of that.

<v ->I can hear people listening to you now though,</v> speak and say, that was awful, that's terrible.

But that can't happen again.

We can never go back to that.

And so, what would you say to people who say, okay, we got you, hear that that was an awful moment in our history, but it's time to march forward?

<v ->Well, yeah, of course, it's always time to go forward.</v> We shouldn't wallow in the past, so to speak.

And yes, it's not gonna happen the same.

History doesn't actually repeat itself.

<v ->But it rhymes.</v> <v ->It can happen.</v> That is to say that rights can be taken away.

I mean after all, in this recent presidential election and the fight over so-called fraud afterwards, where were the areas that were cited as fraudulent voting?

Milwaukee, Philadelphia.

What do those places have in common?

It's not the climate or anything.

It's those are where there's a heck of a lot of black voters who mostly voted for Biden.

The Trump forces were not saying, well, let's look at fraud in rural, Northern Michigan, those were white people.

The effort to manipulate the black vote or suppress the black vote, we have had several states passing all these voter suppression laws.

They're not the same laws as in 1900.

And they don't get up in the state legislature like they did back then and say, this is to stop the end from voting.

No, they say it's fraud.

And another thing Biden talked about in his inaugural was the importance of truth.

That would seem to be a fairly obvious thing but lately it's been under assault.

But if there's any area that truth was suppressed about, it was reconstruction.

<v ->Yes.</v> <v ->And you talked about January 6th</v> and this mosaic of incredible things that happened on this day from the election in Georgia, to the storming of the Capitol, to the removal of the Confederate symbol on the Mississippi flag.

The other thing that we'll be going back to look at historically for decades is the reconvening of Congress on the evening of January 6th, to complete the act of certifying the votes.

And I was incredibly struck.

South Carolina comes up again and again and again and again, and of course it came up that night because Lindsey Graham, as it was becoming clear who was voting which way, stands up and refers to reconstruction in justifying how he was moving forward that night.

We have a clip of this moment that I'd like to play.

<v ->Many times, my state has been the problem, I love it.</v> Is where I wanna die, but no time soon.

Tim and I have a good relationship.

I love Tim Scott.

1876, South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida sent two slate of electors.

They had two governments by the way.

And we didn't know what to do.

Why did South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana do it?

To hold the country hostage to end reconstruction.

It worked.

The commission was eight to seven.

It didn't work.

Nobody accepted it.

The way it ended is when Hayes did a deal with these three states, "You give me the electors, I'll kick the union army out."

The rest is history.

It led to Jim Crow.

If you're looking for historical guidance, this is not the one to pick.

(audience laughing) <v ->20 years ago,</v> if someone had gotten up and talked about reconstruction, they probably would have said, there was this corruption, there was misgovernment, there were these vindictive radicals trying to punish the poor white southerners again.

Now, when people talk about reconstruction, even offhandedly, it's a time of progress.

They relate it to democracy.

They relate it to civil rights.

I think that's a significant change in popular understandings of history.

I feel that I and many other historians who have been fighting that battle for a long time have had some success, but the more real history about reconstruction, not fake history, which has dominated for so long, the more real history is out there.

The more people I think will get a better sense of where we were and how we got to where we are today.

<v ->I wanna go back to one of the points you made, Eric,</v> about not just the political flowering during reconstruction, but the establishment of key institutions.

The black church, HBCUs, again, these two things and the thread of these things into our modern political narrative with Raphael Warnock being elected to the Senate and Kamala Harris, a graduate of Howard University becoming vice president.

There's a through line to the importance of the creation of these institutions.

And Skip, your new film for PBS that's premiering this year is on the black church.

Can you talk a little bit why in this progression of films that are exploring these significant points in our history, you felt that it was important to move from an examination of reconstruction toward this examination of the black church.

<v ->There's absolutely a logic.</v> Du Bois, when he wrote his classic, "Souls of Black Folk", wrote what was then and still remains a brilliant account of the history of the black church.

And the chapter's called, "Of the Faith of Fathers".

And he says, and I use this as an epigraph really for the film, "Thus one can see in the negro church today, reproduced in microcosm, all the great world from which the negro is cut off by color prejudice and social condition.

Practically a proscribed people must have a social center.

And that center for this people is the negro church.

When the color curtain came down, what did black people do?

If you go to movies, even well intentioned documentary films often, stress the protest tradition.

You think that all our ancestors did was protest.

But what we really did, Lynette, was replicate the social world from which we were excluded.

You were a doctor, you couldn't get in the AMA, you formed the NNA.

The National Negro Association.

Three generations of dentists in my family, they couldn't get in the American Dental association.

We formed the National Dental Association.

The National Funeral Director Association.

You were mentioning Kamala, AKA, the divine nine of black sororities, black fraternities, black everything.

So that I am doing first, the black church, which is the oldest, most continuous, and most important of all these black social institutions without a doubt.

We wouldn't be here as a people in my opinion without the black church because I think the black church enabled our enslaved ancestors not to defer gratification.

And I'm using that term loosely to believe in a future, not just the future is stereotypically, you've said, well, no matter how bad slavery is, we'll go to heaven.

I think it allowed them to have their own marriages, have children and believe that those children's lives or their grandchildren's lives eventually would see freedom.

It was a more complex kind of deferred gratification.

I think without the church, they never would have gotten.

<v ->We have the trailer for the new film.</v> Let's take a look.

♪ This is our story ♪ ♪ Oh, this is our song ♪ ♪ Praising my Savior ♪ ♪ Oh-Ooh ♪ ♪ All the day long ♪ ♪ All the day long ♪ <v ->That is great.</v> <v Narrator>In the name of Jesus today oh God,</v> we are rising.

<v ->The black church was more than just a spiritual home,</v> it was the epic center of black life.

Out of it, came our black businesses, our black educational institutions.

<v ->The black church gave people a sense of value,</v> belonging and worthiness.

I don't know how we could have survived as a people without it.

<v ->To tell the story of American religion</v> is to tell a political story.

<v ->The black church helped us to withstand all the slings</v> and arrows of segregation and the segregationists.

♪ In that prayer ♪ ♪ In the morning ♪ (indistinct) <v Narrator>The African-American church is 80 to 90% women</v> but the leadership is 80 to 90% male.

<v ->There's an awful price to pay</v> when you say that you are a same gender loving person.

<v ->If you say you were born this way,</v> then you're saying, God, you're liar.

<v ->We are a Testament to the goodness and the grace of God.</v> Everything in the world has tried to kill us and we're still here.

<v ->Pastor says, you're in the wrong race.</v> The (indistinct) says, I'm in your race.

And I ain't made no mistake.

<v Narrator>It was our (indistinct)</v> the place where our people made a way out of nowhere.

It was that place from which our souls could look back and wonder how we got oath.

♪ Trust in the Lord ♪ ♪ Trust in Lord, (indistinct) ♪ ♪ Trust ♪ We call it the church.

♪ Trust ♪ <v ->You know, the church matters.</v> But we also talk about the flaws of the church, homophobia, sexism, the church, the response to HIV AIDS was embarrassing.

I mean, immoral.

I mean, the church is aligned to apologize for.

But the church was sustained by black women.

The church has its problems and blind spots.

But without the church, there would be no African-American people.

I'm absolutely convinced with that.

<v ->The last thing that I wanna make sure we discuss,</v> because a lot of this conversation has been a binary conversation about black and white.

And when we have conversations like that, it makes it easy for people to tune out and say, the United States in fact is a multicultural society.

And these black white narratives miss so much about the complexities of progress and struggle and equality in the United States.

And one of the things I'm struck by the way, you talk about the importance of the second founding, Eric, and the critical amendments during that time is yes, the establishment of birthright citizenship at the time was beneficial to African-Americans.

But those amendments really have forged an entry point into society for every group of immigrants that have come to the country since then.

And so this understanding of the importance of this moment in our history, it's really important for everyone who's part of the American narrative.

<v ->Yes, you're completely right about that.</v> The word race or black or negro or whatever you wanna call it, does not appear in the 14th Amendment.

The 14th Amendment is for everybody, all persons, citizens.

And as you say, certainly in the 20th century and somewhat in the 21st, the 14th Amendment has been used to expand the rights of all sorts of groups.

I mean, the gay marriage a few years ago is a 14th Amendment decision.

Go back further.

Oe man, one vote.

That applies to everybody, not just African-Americans.

The people who wrote those amendments, on the one hand wanted to make sure that the former slaves were incorporated into the body politic but they also were trying to create a standard for everybody in a society which had been so unequal before the Civil War.

They wanted to have a uniform definition of citizenship and rights that applied to everybody regardless of their race, their ethnicity.

And of course today, we are a multicultural society as you'd say, and the black white template to which maybe never was 100% correct, is certainly not the only way to talk about race today.

<v ->Final thoughts from each of you</v> as you think about this period of years that we've been moving through.

However far back you wanna take it, whether you're looking back four years or 12 years, I think 12 years might be the more accurate span to relate it to reconstruction.

When you think about where we are right now as a country and how we own our history to move forward, what thoughts would you leave people with?

Eric first.

<v ->You know, I think as a historian,</v> I guess I have to say this but I do think it's essential for, in a democracy for citizens to understand our history.

And history in the last few years has become part of the culture wars.

Just the other day on his way out of office, President Trump released this so-called 1776 Report.

It was a travesty, no historian was involved, it was a committee of businessmen.

No historian was involved in putting it together.

But it was a completely whitewashed account of American history having been on a great upward trajectory until apparently the progressive era was when everything went down the drain.

I'm not quite sure what happened.

But I think a real candid view of history is important.

I'm not saying you should just talk about the negative aspects, the oppression, the exploitation.

No, there are many things to be very proud of in the history of the United States.

Especially to my mind, the struggle, the very struggle of people of all backgrounds for greater equality in this country is the dynamic element of progress in American history.

And we can hope that we're on the verge of seeing something like that again now.

The past year has seen remarkable numbers of people taking to the streets to demand racial justice.

Now, the pandemic has kind of slowed that down obviously but the sentiment is still there.

The mobilization I think will still be there, and we have an opportunity to really move forward in the country now.

<v ->Beautifully put.</v> And I certainly agree.

I would say it's important to think of reconstruction as America's first experiment in interracial democracy.

And at its best, it succeeded beautifully and brilliantly.

And that's what we have to take away from reconstruction.

That's what we have to redeem (indistinct).

We need to bring that back, that notion of, well, to quote Barack, it was a lot of red states, blue states, and just the American states.

And there's a lot of black American, white Americans, or Latino America, there's America.

And the only way we're going to, there's one thing that surely to God that we've learned from four years of Donald Trump, is the only way that we can survive and move as a civilization through this complicated century that we're facing.

Facing invisible enemies if we could never even imagine, not even Stephen King could imagine the enemies that we've been facing since Wu Han.

The only way that we can do it is to park our differences, ethnic, cultural, religious at the carb, and define ourselves first and foremost as citizens, the greatest republic on earth.

And everything else comes later.

That's the lesson of reconstruction.

<v ->Well, I would encourage everyone</v> and I think most people are like those of us who didn't learn this in school and there's time now, and there are a lot of resources for people who want to understand this chapter in our history and try to put it into context for the aims that we have today.

And Eric Foner and Skip Gates, thank you so much for your time.

It's been a great conversation.

<v ->Thank you, Lynette</v> Thank you, Eric.

<v ->Thank you.</v> Thank you very much.

Enjoy the conversation.

<v ->For those of you interested in learning more</v> about reconstruction, you can watch the film on reconstruction through your local PBS station.

Also Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s new film, "The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song", premieres on February 16th on PBS.

There's also a companion book that you can access through PBS or through your local bookseller.

Thank you for joining us.

(birds chirping)