Truth Without Reconciliation

Summary

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Podcast Summary: “Truth Without Reconciliation”

Podcast: Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise
Host: Malcolm Gladwell (for Higher Ground Audio)
Episode Release Date: July 2, 2026

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Overview

This episode, “Truth Without Reconciliation,” dives into the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, focusing on the decade of Reconstruction. Malcolm Gladwell and several historians explore the scale and impact of post-emancipation violence faced by Black Americans, the government's efforts to address this violence, and the broader implications for democracy in the US. Key firsthand testimonies from the 1871 Klan Hearings illuminate the harrowing experiences of newly freed individuals, while experts such as Kidada Williams and Robin D.G. Kelley frame these events within ongoing struggles for justice and belonging.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Incomplete Promise of Reconstruction

• Civil War Outcome: The North’s victory and formal abolition of slavery was supposed to herald a new era for Black Americans, with constitutional amendments guaranteeing equal rights.
• Unkept Promises: Beyond legal rights, promises like the Southern Homestead Act offered the hope of land ownership—but enforcing these guarantees in the hostile postwar South proved nearly impossible amid widespread white resistance.
• The Scale of Violence:
  • Statistic Highlight: “There are thousands of people who are killed during Reconstruction, and one estimate puts the number at 54,000.” (Malcolm Glau, 01:23)
  • To put that in perspective: “That is an astonishing number...about the size of a small to mid-sized town.” (Narrator, 01:32–01:37)

Testimonies from the Klan Hearings

• Purpose of the Hearings:
  In 1871, Congress held a series of investigations—often referred to as the Klan Hearings—to document violence against Black citizens and try to legislate against it (see: Enforcement Acts, 03:40).

• Kidada Williams:
  Her research highlights the underreported lived experiences of Black Americans in this era, especially as revealed through primary source testimonies.

• Notable Testimony: Hannah Tutson’s Story (05:05–18:04)

  • Content Warning: The testimony includes harrowing details of physical and sexual violence.
  • Context: Hannah and her husband Samuel, once enslaved, bought land through the Southern Homestead Act. Their success incited a brutal attack by local white men.
  • Description: “They pulled off all my linen, tore it up so that I did not have a piece of rag on me as big as my hand. They tied me and I said, man, what are you gonna do with me? And they said, goddamn you, we will show you. You are living on another man's premises… I gave 150 for it.” (Hannah Tutson, 09:11–09:53)
  • Violence as a Tool: The mob whipped, assaulted, and tried to terrorize Hannah’s family off their land.
  • Aftermath: Despite everything, records show that Hannah and Samuel remained together years later—an uncommon outcome given the trauma.

• Children Not Spared: Tutson’s children also suffered.

  • “One was about 5 years old, another between 9 and 10, and the other was not quite a year old…” (17:25–17:34)
  • The oldest daughter kept her siblings safe during the attack, even feeding the baby berries to keep it quiet.
  • “Yes, sir. And one of its hips, when it began to walk, one of its hips was very bad. And every time you stand it up, it would scream. But I rubbed it and rubbed it, and it looks like it was outgrowing it now.” (Hannah Tutson, 17:43–18:04)

The Logic and Motivation of Reconstruction-Era Violence

• Insight from Prof. Robin D.G. Kelley (19:22–39:21)
  • Violence as Power, Not Hatred:
    “It’s not even about hating Black people… What they want is power.” (Robin D.G. Kelley, 21:23–22:13)
  • State and Mob Violence Intertwined:
    “State violence and mob violence are two sides of the same coin… The Klan itself was a conspiracy on the part of former planters, property owners, with the support of a deputized white population.” (Kelley, 20:41–21:23)
  • Difference from Slavery Violence:
    After emancipation, violence is unconstrained by the “value” enslavers once attributed to their chattel; now, “you don’t have that kind of protection.”

Political Revolution and Its Reversal

• Case Study: Emanuel Fortune (25:47–33:20)
  • Background: From enslaved laborer to shoemaker and farmer, then elected as one of the first African American lawmakers in postwar Florida.
  • Persistent Threats: “There got to be such a state of lawlessness and outrage that I expected that my life was in danger at all times, and I left on that account.” (Emanuel Fortune, 28:24–28:51)
  • Black Political Mobilization: Black men’s voting dramatically altered Southern politics. Women, though formally excluded from the ballot, participated actively in political meetings and exerted pressure on male voters.
  • Reign of Terror: White supremacist violence escalated in reaction to Black political gains, culminating in massacres and driving Blacks out of public life.
  • Failed Federal Response: The DOJ indicted about 3,000 individuals, but few were imprisoned—and most were later pardoned.

Why Reconstruction Was Defeated (Not Failed)

• Failure vs. Defeat:
  “I never call it a failure… I do say that [Reconstruction] was the only real revolution this country has had, the only one. And it wasn’t a failure. It was defeated. And it was defeated with all sorts of force.” (Kelley, 39:21)
• Complicity of the North: For white Southern reactionaries to regain power, they needed Northern indifference or complicity. By the century’s end, Black office-holding in the South was virtually eradicated.

Present Day Echoes

• “More than 150 years after Emmanuel Fortune and Hannah Tutson gave their testimonies in 1871, there are still far too many black people who experience a disproportionate amount of violence at the hands of fellow citizens and law enforcement.” (Glau, 35:25)
• Kelley on Moving Forward:
  “In my own personal opinion, I’d rather fight and honor our ancestors…to try to make it a democracy, than just flee.” (Kelley, 36:05–37:07)
• Role of ‘Good White People’:
  “All the ideas about black inferiority, you’re not born with that. Lynching really can’t take place unless it takes place in the classroom. People write books, whole universities are built around the notion of black inferiority.” (Kelley, 37:22–39:09)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the scale of racial violence:

  “There are thousands of people who are killed during Reconstruction, and one estimate puts the number at 54,000.”
  — Malcolm Glau (01:23)

• Victim testimony—steadfastness in terror:

  “I said, no, I am living on my own premises. I gave 150 for it.”
  — Hannah Tutson (09:14)

• On surviving trauma:

  “To survive a harrowing attack where a husband is bound and whipped and a wife is bound, whipped and sexually assaulted, a lot of couples don’t come back from that... But Hannah and Samuel, they’re still there.”
  — Malcolm Glau (18:04)

• On motivations for violence:

  “It’s not even about hating black people… What they want is power.”
  — Robin D.G. Kelley (21:23)

• On Reconstruction’s collapse:

  “It wasn’t a failure. It was defeated. And it was defeated with all sorts of force.”
  — Robin D.G. Kelley (39:21)

• On the role of white elites:

  “The educated, intelligent, they are really the main source of organized mob actions… all the ideas about black inferiority, you’re not born with that. Lynching… can’t take place unless it takes place in the classroom.”
  — Robin D.G. Kelley (37:22–39:09)

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Important Timestamps

• The scale of postwar violence: 01:23–01:37
• Introduction to Hannah Tutson & her testimony: 05:20–14:03
• Reflections on reading history & survivors’ resilience: 14:03–18:04
• Professor Robin D.G. Kelley on violence & power: 19:22–21:23
• Politics & Emanuel Fortune’s testimony: 25:47–33:20
• Discussion of present-day legacy: 35:25–37:22
• Kelley on racial violence’s intellectual roots: 37:22–39:09
• Reconstruction as a revolution, not a failure: 39:21–40:25

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Conclusion

“Truth Without Reconciliation” powerfully illustrates that Reconstruction was not the end of America’s racial reckoning, but a brief revolutionary period that was violently suppressed. The episode’s mingling of searing testimony, scholarly insight, and present-day reflection exposes how the violent backlash to Black freedom shaped American history—and how its unresolved legacy continues to haunt the nation’s pursuit of democracy.

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Transcript

[Malcolm Glau]

This episode contains graphic depictions of sexual and physical violence. Please take care while listening.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

By 1871, the government of the United States had made a number of promises to black people of the south, many of whom had fought for the Union. Some of these promises, as we have heard, were codified as new amendments to the Constitution. That slavery was abolished, that black men had the right to vote, that black citizens were entitled to equal protection under the law. But there were other promises as well, like the Southern Homestead act, which allowed formerly enslaved people and poor whites the ability to purchase parcels of land. The burning question by 1871 was, how would these promises be kept? Because it was very clear that many Southern whites were not cooperating, that in fact, they were responding with horrific violence and terror against just about any black person who tried to exercise their rights under the law. My name is Malcolm Glau, and this is the Unfinished Promise. Can you give me some sense of the scale of the violence here?

[Malcolm Glau]

So there are thousands of people who are killed during Reconstruction, and one estimate puts the number at 54,000.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a. That is an astonishing number.

[Malcolm Glau]

Yes. Which is about the size of a small to mid sized town. So imagine that the population of a town disappearing, being killed over a roughly 30 year period.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

I'm speaking with historian Kidada Williams, who's written two books about how black Americans asserted their rights during the Reconstruction era. What's remarkable about her scholarship is how it brings to life stories that have been too long overlooked, stories she's found in newspapers, in letters, and in public testimony. Her podcast, Seizing Freedom, brings those stories to life as well. When you listen to these voices she's unearthed from the Reconstruction era, you start to doubt that the Civil War really came to an end in 1865 when the history books say it did.

[Malcolm Glau]

And so even though peace had been declared on paper, we see enslavers and their allies using a great deal of violence to try to preserve slavery as much as possible. And so they are, to a degree, waging a war against newly freed black people.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

So what choice does Congress make in the wake of this kind of violence? Cause Congress is the body that established Reconstruction.

[Malcolm Glau]

I think Congress makes decisions that it can, recognizing how resistant the larger population was to emancipation. There is this idea that resistance to emancipation is only in the south, but there's extreme resistance to emancipation in the north and the West. And so Congress authorizes these preliminary investigations. The Attorney General partnered with the Treasury Department to send agents south to investigate and arrest offenders. So that's one of the first Things that they do, and they're finding enough information that merits legislation. And so Congress will pass the enforcement acts of 1870 and 1871.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

As Kidada explained to me, the Enforcement Acts were a series of laws passed by Congress to protect the civil liberties and voting rights of African Americans. But members of Congress also attempted to document what was happening over the course of seven months in 1871, they traveled around the south and invited hundreds of witnesses, black and white, to describe the violence they had experienced. They even interviewed some of the perpetrators. These inquiries are sometimes called the Klan Hearings, although not all of the perpetrators were part of the Klan. And they were the only real official effort in all of American history to publicly reckon with the violence that followed the war. Many of those who testified were speaking on the record about their experiences for the first time. And I have to warn you, this testimony involves graphic depictions of violence.

[Malcolm Glau]

You've got victims, perpetrators, elected officials, and in that group, you have about 200 African Americans who testify at the hearings,

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

state your age, where you were born, and where you now live.

[Hannah Tutson]

As near as I can tell, I'm about 42 or 43 years old. I was born in Gadsden, Florida, and I now live in Clay county, near Waldo, on old number 11 pond.

[Malcolm Glau]

One of the testimonies that really stuck out to me was that of Hannah Tutson. She testified in Jacksonville, Florida, on November 10th in 1871.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

Are you the wife of Samuel Tutson?

[Hannah Tutson]

Yes, sir.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

Were you at home when he was whipped last spring?

[Hannah Tutson]

Yes, I was at home.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

Tell us what took place and how it was done.

[Hannah Tutson]

When they came to my house that night, the dog barked twice and the old man got up and went out of doors and then came back and laid down. The dog flew out again, and I got up and went out of doors, but I could see nothing. I went back into the house, and just as I got into bed, five men bulged right against the door, and the door fell right in the middle of the floor, and they all fell down.

[Malcolm Glau]

Hannah was a newly freed woman. She was a wife, she was a mother. She had three younger children in the house. She also had several older children that had moved out and were living on their own. I can imagine that Hannah looked like a lot of black women at the time. She could have been brown skinned, she could have been light skinned, she could have been dark skinned. We just don't know. She could have been really slim coming out of slavery, or she could have been thick because she was in her early 40s when she testified. She would have Been moving towards menopause. I see a constellation of possibilities from all of the black people that I know myself, that I've seen in photographs. Over time. She's got a whole world mapped out in her mind. She had her own dreams of what her life was going to be like, having survived what she called the red times of slavery. She's working alongside her husband to build a new life for their family. She's doing everything she believes she should do, and yet she is being menaced and harassed by these people who want to deny her everything and they dismantle her life.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

Tell us what took place and how it was done.

[Hannah Tutson]

George McCree. He ran right to me and gathered me by the arm. As I saw him coming. I picked up the child, the baby, and held onto him. The old man threw his arms around my neck, held onto me. Another man catch hold of my foot. And then there was so many hold of me, I cannot tell who they were.

[Malcolm Glau]

The committee is asking her about the details of the May 1871 raid on her family's home. And she's describing what happened when a white man named George McRae attacked her and her family.

[Hannah Tutson]

I started to scream, and George McRae catched me right by the throat and choked me. I whirled round and round and he catched the little child by the foot, slinged it out of my arms. I screamed again, and he got a hold of me again. Then there were so many hold of me that they got me outdoors.

[Malcolm Glau]

Hannah and Samuel had just barely made it out of slavery. They spent several years scrimping and saving every penny they could to buy land. They purchased it legally through a government program, and hardly any time passed before gangs of white men began to harass Hannah and her family. The five men dragged Hannah and her husband outside. One of the men stomped on Samuel as Hannah begged her husband to stop fighting back.

[Hannah Tutson]

I said, sam, give up. It's not worthwhile to try to do anything. They'll try to kill us here. They took and carried me to a pine just as large as I could get my arms around. And then they tied my hands there. They pulled off all my linen, tore it up so that I did not have a piece of rag on me as big as my hand. They tied me and I said, man, what are you gonna do with me? And they said, goddamn you, we will show you. You are living on another man's premises. I said, no, I am living on my own premises. I gave 150 for it.

[Malcolm Glau]

Samuel and Hannah are part of a rural community. Their testimonies indicate that it's a mixed race community with black and white and probably Native American neighbors. What most people seem to be doing when they acquire land is build a home, plant a large garden, bring in their livestock and start a crop. On top of helping Samuel with a homestead, Hannah has her own business as a laundress. Doing laundry was how many black women helped their families survive the transition from slavery to freedom. I imagine Hannah's work was probably crucial in their ability to purchase their land. Congress passed the Southern Homestead act in 1866 to help newly freed African Americans acquire land. One of the conditions of the Homestead act is that you have to stay on the land in order to keep it. You have to pay the fee. You have to stay on the land continuously for a period of time, and you have to improve the land, meaning you have to grow a crop, et cetera, on it. So what you're hearing in Hannah's testimony is that she will not be intimidated or threatened off her family's land. She knows that if her family leaves, they'll lose everything. As I read her testimony, I learned that the same men had been to her home three weeks before. And when those men returned to their land, they did much more than threaten Hannah and her family. One of the first things the men did was separate Hannah and Samuel. They take them to completely different parts of their property. They tie Hannah to a tree. A few of the men begin whipping her. This continued well into the night. The men, they take breaks from their assault of Hannah while they destroy their crops, while they tear down their home. And when some of the men would go off and leave, one of the men who stayed, George McRae, took that as an opportunity to assault Hannah.

[Hannah Tutson]

Every time they would go off, George McCrae would act scandalously and ridiculously toward me and treat me shamefully. When he, George, saw them coming again, he would make me get up. He would make me squat down by the pine and say, what are you trembling for? I'd say that I was cold and was afraid that I would freeze. He would get his knees between my legs and say, goddamn you, open your legs. He sat down there and said, old lady, if you don't let me have my way with you, I will kill you. I said, no, do just what you are going to do. They whipped me and went off again to the horses and got liquor of some kind and poured it on my head and I smelt it for three weeks. So it made me sick. They went off and whispered, and then George McCrae told them to go to my house and tear it down. There were four men whipping me at once

[Malcolm Glau]

with the straps that you would use on a horse. These were one of many tools that attackers used to assault the people they were holding hostage during these raids. They used everything from branches to whips, ropes, and chains.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

How many lashes did they give you

[Hannah Tutson]

in all, can I tell you? For they whipped me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. I was just raw. The blood oozed out through my frock, all around my waist, clean through. After I got away from them that night, I ran to my house. My house was torn down.

[Malcolm Glau]

After the men grew tired of abusing Hannah and her husband. They just left Hannah, bloody naked and most likely in excruciating pain, made her way back home. When I first started reading the congressional testimonies, I read them like a lot of historians typically read them, meaning I skipped past a lot of information, and I honed in on Hannah's description of her sexual assault. As I developed a better lens for reading the testimonies, I started to slow down and not just take in her sexual assault, but to understand all of the things that led up to it, all of the things that happened around it, and all of the things that happened afterward. And I felt a sense of even shame that I had missed all of the other details of her testimony. And so I felt that in some ways, maybe that she's calling to me from across time, saying almost that you missed it, that you missed it. You still don't get it. I think what Hannah wanted me to see really clearly, that her babies were in the house when they were attacked. And they were injured in the attack, too, in ways that historians who look at these records often do not consider at all.

[Hannah Tutson]

I said, lord, my little children are dead. I went to the box of my things, and I picked up a dress I had there. But I went five miles before I put it on my back. When I got near one of my neighbor's house, I hollered, murder. And they heard me, and they said they heard horses feet go by. I did hear horses myself, and I hollered, for I was afraid. I cannot read, and I've got no clock. But as near as I can tell, an hour must have passed. And I went 12 miles by sunrise. After I got away from them,

[Malcolm Glau]

she goes searching for her family. She doesn't find the children at the house, which has been torn down. She fears that they have been killed. She goes back, continues to look, and she finds Samuel passed out, tied to a tree. They still don't know where the children are. They wait until the sun rises, and shortly after that, their daughter and her two siblings come home. What we realize is that the daughter grabbed her two siblings when her parents were being dragged out of the house and ran to a wood pile far away to hide from the men. The eldest daughter explained that she fed the baby gooseberries to keep it from crying and attracting the men to where they were hiding.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

How old were your children?

[Hannah Tutson]

One was about 5 years old, another between 9 and 10, and the other was not quite a year old, lacking two months.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

That was the one you had in your arms when they jerked it away?

[Hannah Tutson]

Yes, sir.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

Did the baby get hurt?

[Hannah Tutson]

Yes, sir. And one of its hips, when it began to walk, one of its hips was very bad. And every time you stand it up, it would scream. But I rubbed it and rubbed it, and it looks like it was outgrowing it. Now,

[Malcolm Glau]

What reading Hannah's story made me want to do is to try to figure out if I could learn anything about what happens to them after they testify at the hearings. When you're doing that kind of archival research, you lose track of people over time. Nearly 15 years after Hannah testified at the Klan hearings, I found them in the Florida census. She had moved from where they were, along with Samuel and two of their children. They were all living in St. Johns County, Florida. But I'm struck by the fact that they are still together because to survive a harrowing attack where a husband is bound and whipped and a wife is bound, whipped and sexually assaulted, a lot of couples don't come back from that. They can't live with each other and with what happened to them. But Hannah and Samuel, they're still there. I don't know if it was a healthy union or not, but I know that they're together, and that is, at least for me, it is, if not comforting, then interesting. Do you remember your thoughts and reactions when you first encountered the testimonies from the Klan hearings?

[Professor Robin D.G. Kelley]

Well, it's an incredible compilation of descriptive violence of all sorts of.

[Malcolm Glau]

To help make sense of the motivation behind the violence, I wanted to speak to another historian, Professor Robin D.G. kelly. Kelly is one of the most renowned scholars of the interracial political movements that emerged in the south after Reconstruction was overthrown. And he teaches a class about the Klan hearings at UC Berkeley.

[Professor Robin D.G. Kelley]

One of the things I really emphasize in my own thinking about violence is what is it for? You know, so much of it is political violence about suppressing a movement, a revolution, and there's not a more revolutionary moment in American history than Reconstruction. And so it's violence produced by the state and the state's relationship to mob violence. And that's something that we should talk about. The violence coming from the former Confederates, coming from the Ku Klux Klan, which was driven by elites. That violence, I would argue, is an extension of the shadow state trying to basically take back power in the South.

[Malcolm Glau]

Slavery, we know, is incredibly violent. But is the violence after slavery is abolished different in your mind?

[Professor Robin D.G. Kelley]

Postbellum violence is different in many ways. One, now you're talking about black people who are not property. So the value of an African who is in bondage is one that required the owner to protect that investment. Now you don't have that kind of protection. The other thing which I think is really, really important, I don't want to lose this, is that state violence in mob violence are two sides of the same coin. In other words, they're completely connected. So the Klan itself was a conspiracy on the part of former planters, property owners, with the support of a deputized white population. And so what ends up happening in 1871, 72, 73, that whole period, this constant struggle of massacres, massacres that are in the service of this new formation or new state power. So I think it's really important not to see organizations like the Klan as just like a bunch of backwards, ignorant people who hate black people. It's not even about hating black people. You know, you can hate or not hate. What they want is power.

[Emanuel Fortune]

Foreign.

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[Narrator/Interviewer]

When black people gained the right to vote, they upended the balance of political power in the South. One story that really struck me in the historical record is that of Emanuel Fortune. Fortune lived in Jackson County, Florida, way up in the panhandle of the state. He had been enslaved and he was in his 30s when reconstruction began. He became a shoemaker and a farmer, a leader in the community. In 1868, Fortune was elected as one of four representatives from his county to the state Constitutional convention. And that's where his career in politics began. By the time Congress held its so called Klan hearings, Fortune had been elected to the Florida House of Representatives he testified on the same day as Hannah Tutson, November 10, 1871.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

State your age, where you were born, where you now live, and what is your occupation.

[Emanuel Fortune]

I am going on 39 years old. I was born in Jackson county in this state, and I now live in Jacksonville.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

This testimony reveals yet another dramatic story, one that Kidada Williams wrote about in her book, I saw death coming.

[Malcolm Glau]

Emmanuel Fortune was a native Floridian and the only surviving parent to three children. His wife died in 1871, just months before he gave his testimony at the congressional hearing. I think that fortune would have dressed his best. He was a lawmaker, so he would have been used to doing that. And as most proud black men do, you know, when they're going to important places, when they've got important business, they dress accordingly. If the hair would have been done, that part would have been super straight. Coals would have been cleaned, pressed and ready to go. When people like Emmanuel Fortune go and testify, they would have gone to these often big formal places, often big buildings. Sometimes they may be state buildings, and depending on the weather, it may be inside, but it might be outside. I would imagine that fortune had a knife or a gun on him for his own self defense. No one was going to be patting them down before they went into the room. They're not there with long guns or anything, but, you know, you could keep a pistol on your person.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

When did you leave Jackson county in May 1869? And why did you leave there?

[Emanuel Fortune]

There got to be such a state of lawlessness and outrage that I expected that my life was in danger at all times, and I left on that account. In fact, I got indirectly information very often that I would be missing someday and no one would know where I was, on account of my being a leading man in politics and taking a very active part in it.

[Malcolm Glau]

You can't overstate the political change black political power represents in the South. Once black men start voting, that dramatically alters the balance of power in the region. Emanuel and his community were in the plantation belt, which is where many enslavers had produced cotton before the war. This meant there was a large black population there. And all of these now free black people saw this moment as an opportunity to participate in the democratic process. One of the things that we know is that there are a lot of black political meetings. And at the black political meetings, you see something that you don't see at the white political meetings, and that is the participation of black women. What black people transitioning from slavery to freedom knew is that the vote didn't belong to the men. So even without the formal franchise, black women are participating in those political meetings, in those political discussions. And we have records that show that in certain communities, black women are organizing to excommunicate and arrange for the public whipping of men who don't vote or who don't vote according to what the community wishes. And this may seem extreme for people today, but for black people who are transitioning from slavery to freedom, we're talking about real life and death matters. That's how seriously they take the vote.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

You took a leading part in politics in your county?

[Emanuel Fortune]

Yes, sir.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

Did you make political addresses all over your county?

[Emanuel Fortune]

Yes, sir.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

Were you personally injured by your opponents?

[Emanuel Fortune]

No, sir. They never would attack us openly. That is not their way of getting revenge. They are too sharp for that.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

They treated you civilly to your face?

[Emanuel Fortune]

Yes, sir.

[Malcolm Glau]

He says, they speak to me civilly, but I hear things that are happening in the community. I hear that threats are being made against me. He mentions a point where he is away from his home and there are other people saying, you know, I saw these strange white men by your house.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

Had there been any men killed in your county before you left?

[Emanuel Fortune]

Yes, sir. Several were killed. Dr. Finlayson was killed for one, and Major Perman was shot at the same time. Three men were called out of their doors and shot. Some were shot through the cracks of their houses and others as they were going into the houses. I do not remember their names, but there were a great many cases of that kind. Before I left, I was told by my friends that there were men staying around my place as though. Though for no good purpose. I expected that my days were very few, and I thought I would leave for a while.

[Malcolm Glau]

After black men started to vote, the violence intensified. It peaked during what they called the Jackson Massacre. In a short period, between 150 and 200 Republican men were killed. This was in and around Jackson County, Florida, where Emmanuel Fortune used to live. Emmanuel was meant to be one of those murdered men. And despite the risks that testifying involved, he showed up to the hearings to tell his story. All over the region, black political leaders and their white allies were being terrorized, attacked, and sometimes murdered on a near daily basis. The violence lasted for years, from Louisiana to South Carolina, from Mississippi to Florida. The congressional hearings where Emanuel and Hanna testified were part of a series of progressive federal efforts to deal with the violence. Congress actually created the Department of Justice specifically in an effort to investigate and prosecute the Klan. So there was some hope that there'd be accountability for the violence. But that's not what happened. As part of the larger effort to ignore and abandon Reconstruction, federal grand juries only issued about 3,000 indictments. Only 65 individuals were ever in prison, and most of them were eventually pardoned.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

In the end, the widespread network of terror in the south accomplished what it intended to do. People like Hannah Tutson and her family lost their land and fled, and elected officials like Fortune were run out of office and out of their hometowns. By the turn of the century, there were hardly any black people left holding public office in the south, and the after effects extended well beyond.

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[Tommy Vietor]

We are in uncharted territory.

[David Remnick]

Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Tommy Vietor]

I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day, and there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scheme of history and context. That's what I come to the New Yorker for.

[David Remnick]

I'm David Remnick, and each week my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world, and I hope you'll join us for the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Malcolm Glau]

What's most disappointing is that more than 150 years after Emmanuel Fortune and Hannah Tutson gave their testimonies in 1871, there are still far too many black people who experience a disproportionate amount of violence at the hands of fellow citizens and law enforcement. In my conversation with Robin DG Kelly, I asked him to help make sense of that grim reality. Where do we focus our energy today with all of this ongoing violence and anti blackness?

[Professor Robin D.G. Kelley]

Oh God, I mean, what a question. As we're facing fascism in the United States right now. Not incident, but it's.

[Malcolm Glau]

That's why we're asking it.

[Professor Robin D.G. Kelley]

I don't have a good answer because each day my wife and I are like, okay, well, so we're moving to, you know, that's also part of our tradition to get out of Dodge. We come from migratory people, either forced migration or voluntary in the sense that there's only so much fight left. In my own personal opinion, I'd rather fight and honor our ancestors that you write about. That is those people who lost their lives to defend democracy in this country, to try to make it a democracy, than just flee. Because there may be one country, but there's also one planet. And this one country we live in has its fingers and tentacles all over the world. So there's no escaping it. You know, this is the nature of the global economy. So how do we transform it?

[Malcolm Glau]

One of the things that happens whenever I give talks, especially about racist violence, someone inevitably asks me about the quote, good white people. Do you get this question? And if so, what do you think is behind the question?

[Professor Robin D.G. Kelley]

Yeah, I get that question all the time. What's behind it? One I think is just guilt, you know, but the other thing is, sadly, there's this ongoing mythology that the good white people are the elites. They don't usually ask the question in terms of who were the white working people who were working on the docks or digging ditches or even in other forms of low wage labor, working alongside black workers to try to do something, try to change something. That's not it. It's about the educated, the intelligent. But what I say to them, I said, you know, the educated, intelligent, they are really the main source of organized mob actions. They may not participate, their hands may not be soiled, but they produce a certain kind of knowledge. You know, all the ideas about black inferiority, you're not born with that. Lynching really can't take place unless it takes place in the classroom. People write books, whole universities are built around the notion of black inferiority. So these so called elites are the ones producing ideas which generate this level of violence. I don't know what it means to be good, but I do know what it means to be completely ignorant of your class interests. And for some reason, all the potentially good white people continue to be hoodwinked by racism. You know, racism has done a number on white people and as a result of that, we don't have democracy.

[Malcolm Glau]

How do you talk about reconstruction to your students and the public? What do you say worked and didn't Sometimes people call it a failure. Is that the language you use? Why or why not?

[Professor Robin D.G. Kelley]

I never call it a failure. What I do say is that moment from about 1865 to really into the early 1880s in certain places, that's when America was most democratic. It was the only real revolution that this country has had, the only one. And it wasn't a failure. It was defeated. And it was defeated with all sorts of force. It doesn't mean that we can't win or we haven't won some things, but it means that that opportunity not only changed the nation, but changed the world and opened up the pathway for the expansion of colonialism and forms of domination that might have been stopped. Had we had a real, true multiracial working class democracy in this country, everything would have been different. But this is where we are, you know?

[Narrator/Interviewer]

The Reconstruction era was short lived, yet tumultuous. Triumph and tragedy, bad luck and sheer horror. But violence alone wasn't enough to bring it down. For the Confederates to regain control of the south, the political leaders of the north also had to capitulate. So why would a group of people who fought so hard to rebuild the nation as a multiracial democracy just give up the fight? The answers are, of course, complicated and nuanced, but one reason, one very big part of it, had to do with money. Coming up, we'll follow the story of an audacious 19th century white collar crime, one that helped former Confederates put an end to reconstruction.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

The board got together and they said, all right, let's put Douglas in charge.

[Emanuel Fortune]

That'll give black people confidence.

[Congressional Hearing Questioner]

Because if Frederick Douglass is in charge of this, well, that means there's got to be something good going on here. It is not what it meant.

[David Remnick]

Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. David I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts,

[Tommy Vietor]

the headlines never stop and it's harder than ever to tell what's real, what matters, and what's just noise. That's where Pod Save America comes in. I'm Tommy Vitor, and every week I'm joined by fellow former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer to break down the biggest stories, unpack what they mean for the future of our democracy, and add just enough humor to stay sane. Along the way, you'll also hear honest, in depth conversations with big voices in politics, media and culture like Rachel Maddow, Gavin Newsom and Mark Cuban that you won't find anywhere else. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday, with deep dives every other weekend. Listen wherever you get your your podcast, watch on YouTube or subscribe on Apple Podcasts for ad free episodes.