The collapse of the antebellum Southern legal order left freedpeople exposed to violence from whites desperately trying to re-establish racial hierarchies. Some black people tried to defend themselves, acquiring weapons and forming militias. How common—and how effective—was that strategy?

In Episode 5 of Reconstruction: A Slate Academy, Rebecca Onion and Jamelle Bouie are joined by Kidada Williams, author of They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I.

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Formerly enslaved black Americans held a majority of the seats in South Carolina’s state Legislature in 1868, and no other state elected as many black Americans during the Reconstruction era. How successfully did these politicians wield their newfound power? And compared to other eras, was political corruption really as endemic as white Americans claimed? 

In Episode 4 of Reconstruction: A Slate Academy, Rebecca Onion and Jamelle Bouie are joined by Kate Masur, the author of An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C., to explore the new political order that surfaced briefly in South Carolina and other Southern states after the Civil War. 

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Episode 1: Experiments in Land-owning: Davis Bend and Cameron Place

Some freedpeople ended up owning parcels of the land they had worked when enslaved. Some formed intentional communities to farm it. By the end of Reconstruction, most of them had no land to their names.

Amy Murrell Taylor is the author of The Divided Family in Civil War America.

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