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Review: Essential History in 'Reconstruction' on PBS

How’s this for a state of emergency: An entire region of the country takes up armed resistance against the federal government, brazenly murdering and raping its African American citizens in a decadeslong campaign of terror that subverts and then rewrites the law.

More dire, certainly, than an invasion of criminal migrants at the border. And it actually happened.

The shockingly violent, depressingly predictable backlash in the American South to the end of slavery, and to the attempt to make freed slaves equal members of society, is the central concern of “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War,” a four-hour PBS series written and narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (It shows in two-hour installments, on Tuesday and on April 16.)

Among the many lacunae in Americans’ knowledge of their own history, our hazy notions of Reconstruction and its overthrow — essential to an understanding of so much in our own times, from the civil rights movement to today’s mirror-like rise of white nationalism — may be the most damaging. Many people, if they have any sense of the era at all, came by it through “Gone With the Wind” or, even more grievously, “The Birth of a Nation.”

So Gates’ series is a great service, especially in its first two hours, which cover the years from the end of the Civil War, with the initial enthusiasm and promise of Reconstruction, to the contested election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, which essentially ended the federal government’s efforts to enforce Reconstruction in the South.

The project mostly hews to the standard PBS history format, with a large cast of scholars and writers — more than 40 — talking over antique photographs and documents, with the occasional impressionistic recreation of events and snippets of gospel and ragtime. But it also incorporates contemporary images of violence and protest, and it is distinguished by Gates’ onscreen presence, talking to the camera while strolling through the story’s locales and interviewing inheritors of the struggle.

Without hitting us over the head, the series continually brings out connections and correspondences between then and now. One of the first great fruits of Reconstruction is the establishment, in the 14th Amendment, of birthright citizenship, now under attack. “Convict leasing” institutionalizes the unwarranted jailing of African American men and women to provide labor for plantations that no longer have slaves. Techniques like poll taxes and literacy tests are quickly invented to suppress the black vote.

“Fake news” campaigns alleging the rape of white women are used to incite and justify the indiscriminate killing and lynching of black men. Minstrelsy and blackface powerfully reinforce notions of white supremacy. Overwhelming efforts in the South to rewrite history and take slavery out of the Civil War narrative lead to the proliferation of Confederate monuments (and thus, more than a century later, to pitched battles and murder in Charlottesville, Virginia).

The series’ second two hours — which cover subjects like the Jim Crow system, the Ku Klux Klan, W.E.B. DuBois, the creation of the NAACP and the ascendance of black popular culture — are engrossing but less urgent. To cover so much ground, they settle into a more anecdotal, great-person approach. (For a more detailed look at some of the stories in this period, seek out the invaluable documentaries of Stanley Nelson, like “The Black Press” and “Tell Them We Are Rising: Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” both streaming online.)

It’s conceivable that “Reconstruction” could be criticized for being one-sided — for not finding someone to defend the romantic view of Confederate history, or to make the contemporary case that white Americans are economically and culturally victimized. It would be a baseless criticism from the point of view of scholarship or principle. One thought, though: The series’s accounts of violence against African Americans tend to have an abstract feeling, and some direct insight into the racist mindset could help to communicate its full force.

“Reconstruction” chooses to tell its story soberly and quietly. From the beginning, it silently establishes a predominant visual motif: photographic portraits of African Americans, singly and in groups small and large, in fields, yards and forest clearings, on church lawns, school steps and front porches. Their subjects look directly into the camera, proudly and, to the modern eye, accusingly. The succession of images insists on their dignity and humanity at a time when these qualities were brutally denied, a point made explicitly late in the series in a segment on the importance of photography in the African American community.

Their descendants continue to make that same case: Half of the 40-plus historians Gates has assembled are black. Calmly dissecting white America’s unceasing claim that they aren’t intelligent or civilized enough for full citizenship, those scholars are the irrefutable answer, still in plain sight after 400 years.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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