Historian @HenryLouisGates won a 2020 duPont award for his series “Reconstruction: America after the Civil War,” from @PBS and @McGee_Media. #ReconstructionPBS.
@HenryLouisGates @PBS @McGee_Media The whole series is available to stream for FREE! #ReconstructionPBS pbs.org/weta/reconstru…
This multi-part documentary shone a light on the period between 1865 and 1877 when the federal government attempted to rebuild the South and establish meaningful reforms.
The series won a #duPont award because it not only drew important connections between the Reconstruction Era and the present, but it also highlighted the flourishing of Black excellence in the late 1860s and early 1870s.
The first Black governor in the United States was P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana, who served as Louisiana’s 12th Lieutenant Governor and then, in late 1872 and early 1873, briefly served as governor. 
Blanche Bruce and Hiram Revels were the first Black men to serve in the senate. Revels was elected in 1870 and Bruce in 1874.
Reconstruction ended in 1877 when Rutherford B. Hayes - the first president to win the electoral college and lose the popular vote - made a deal that ensured he would be president, and that the federal troops managing reconstruction would leave the south.
After the 12 years of progress and promise, what followed were decades of Jim Crow laws and white terror including lynchings, the formation of the modern day KKK, and massacres like the one that destroyed the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa in 1921.
“Reconstruction” premiered at a time when voter-suppression, blackface minstrelsy, and a resurgence of white supremacist violence were making headlines. @HenryLouisGates showed how the roots of those phenomena were found in a neglected, misunderstood chapter of national history.
Have you done work that provides historical context for the present? The duPonts have EXTENDED the submission period to July 14! Eligibility is also extended for programming that appears after July 1 and before or on July 14. Visit duPont.org to submit. #duPont2021
