LeeAnna Keith: Exploring Reconstruction | BRI Scholar Talks

Join BRI Senior Teaching Fellow Tony Williams as he sits down with historian LeeAnna Keith, contributor to BRI’s new Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness textbook on the immense obstacles that African Americans continued to encounter during the Reconstruction era and into the twentieth century.

Keith explains how African Americans suffered tragic racial violence and white supremacy during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, despite constitutional protections in the Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment, and 15th Amendments. She also touches on an array of other important postwar developments, such as the segregation of African Americans under Jim Crow laws and various restrictions on black civil rights. Finally, Keith finds encouragement in the influential ideas of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington for justice and equality and the civil rights movement of the twentieth century.