A century before today’s fights on book bans and history curriculums, pioneering Black lawmaker John Roy Lynch sought to correct the record on Reconstruction.
An engraving of John Roy Lynch, circa 1884. He was 25 when he became the first Black member of Congress from Mississippi. More than a century before the backlash to the post-George Floyd racial reckoning produced book bans and restrictions on Black history curriculums, a pioneering Black lawmaker wrote a landmark critique of White historians’ attempt to rewrite the narrative of the Reconstruction era.
In the book, Lynch recounted his improbable life story. Born into slavery on a plantation in Louisiana, he was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and moved to Natchez, Miss., where he received an informal education by overhearing the lessons from a local White school across the alley from his job at a photography store.
Then came the revisionism. The histories of the era written by Lynch’s White contemporaries described the period as a tragic farce, not because multiracial democracy had been overturned so violently and abruptly, but because it had been attempted at all. Black Southerners were portrayed as ignorant and corrupt, undeserving of the benefits of citizenship and easily duped by greedy Northern “carpetbaggers” and conniving Southern “scalawags.
Today, a debate over the country’s racial history is again raging, as one recent leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Seventy-four laws have been passed at the state level since 2021 limiting how race, sex and gender are taught in schools, aThese kinds of fights date back more than a century, to the critiques of Reconstruction that formed the first serious histories of the era.
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