My first full-time teaching job was at a black college,

Tougaloo College in Mississippi.

That's James Lowen. He's a sociologist now, but like he said,

he used to be a teacher back in the day. And Tougaloo, just for the record, is not too far from Jackson,

Mississippi, and it's an accounting that's about 70 percent black.

I had 17 new students in my new second semester seminar in that course, and I didn't want to do all

the talking that first day of class. So I asked them, I said, okay, what is reconstruction?

What comes to your mind from that period?

And James was really taken aback by their answers.

And what happened to me was an aha experience, although you might better consider it an oh-no experience.

Sixteen out of my 17 students said, well, reconstruction was the period right after the Civil War,

when blacks took over the government of the Southern states, but they were too soon

out of slavery, and so they screwed up, and white folks had to take control again.

He said his heart sank in that moment listening to it.

I mean, there's at least three direct lies in that sentence.

Blacks never took over the government of the Southern states. All of the Southern states had white

governors throughout the period, all but one had white legislative majorities. Second of all,

the reconstruction governments did not screw up across the South without exception.

They wrote the best state constitutions that the Southern states have ever had,

including better than the ones that they labor under today.

A third lie would be whites didn't take control of certain group of whites,

of course it was white supremacist Democrats using KKK tactics.

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