They Never Intended to Do Me Justice: African American Families in the War against Reconstruction

with Dr. Kidada Williams, Wayne State University

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been sidelined, impoverishing our understanding of the obstacles post-Civil War Black families faced, their inspiring determination to survive, and the physical and emotional scars they bore because of it.

Kidada E. Williams researches African Americans’ experiences of racist violence. Her first book, They Left Great Marks on Me, explored Black people’s personal testimonies of violence and their role in mobilizing civil rights advocates to fight lynching and other forms of white supremacist oppression. Her most recent book, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction, offers a heart-wrenching reexamination of the struggle for survival in the Reconstruction-era South, and what it cost.

Williams is also one of the co-developers of #CharlestonSyllabus, a crowd-sourced project that helped people understand the historical context surrounding the 2015 racial massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church.

Lately, she has been extending her commitment to African American history by sharing her expertise on survivors of anti-black violence on podcasts, like Scene on Radio’s The Land That Has Never Been Yet, Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes, MSNBC’s Into America, and the Slate Academy history series on Reconstruction.

She is also the host and co-producer of Seizing Freedom, a podcast docudrama that covered the epic story of African Americans’ fight for freedom during the Civil War and beyond.