Sam hosts Kidada E. Williams, associate professor of history at Wayne State University, to discuss her recent book I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction.

Kidada joins the show and Sam and her start off by recapping what The “Dunning School” of history was, how it came about, and what its essential project was (sanitizing the Confederacy, as well as the racist, violent legacy of postCivil War Reconstruction.) Sam and Professor Williams also marvel at how successful the project of the Dunning School was, highlighting anecdotally how minimal amounts of time and resources were dedicated in classrooms to fully fleshing out the harmful Reconstruction’s effects on black Americans actually were. Professor Williams then dives into her scholarship, where she located direct testimony from families taken in the field by members of Congress in the postCivil War South, and how these testimonies paint a picture of what really happened after the Civil War supposedly “ended”: the fighting became a sort of guerrilla war against free black people, and the war itself didn’t neatly “end”, so to speak. Professor Williams recounts, per her research, the gratuitous and brutal violence free black people faced even after being released from bondage, and even after receiving the rights that they did not possess before prior to the Civil War. They wrap up the conversation by centering the issues of white supremacy and how crucial they are to what happened during Reconstruction: a concerted effort and investment in the furtherance of white supremacy, not just by white Southerners, but by white Northerners too, in the project of continuing to marginalize and subjugate free black people.

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