![]() ![]() Reconstruction governments did not “screw up.” They created the best constitutions the South had ever had, and better governments than any others in the South in the 19th century. They all had white governors, and all but one had white legislative majorities. Patiently, he explained to his class: Black people never took over the Southern states. ![]() It was a glimpse of the enormous task before him: setting the historical record straight for Mississippi’s - and America’s - young students. Loewen’s heart sank, he told NPR in 2018. But they were too soon out of slavery, and so they screwed up and white folks had to take control again.”ĭr. “Well,” he recalled them saying, “Reconstruction was the period right after the Civil War when Blacks took over the government of the Southern states. Facing his first freshman class, he posed a seemingly simple question for 17 students: “What is Reconstruction?” ![]() Loewen was raised in Illinois and educated in Minnesota and at Harvard, and he began his half-century as a university professor of sociology in 1968 at Tougaloo College, a historically Black liberal arts institution in Mississippi. His 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is a widely read critique of the distorted picture of race in America’s history textbooks. ![]() Loewen, a well-known sociologist, has died. ![]()
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