We normally wouldn’t post a random YouTube clip from a movie - but this clip from the movie Glory took place here in Beaufort 160 years ago today, as the 54th MA arrived here on 6/3/1863

So if you meet a ranger today and they’re humming that tune… What a scene that must have been, as the mostly free-born men of the 54th MA arrived the day after the Combahee refugees were led into Beaufort by Harriet Tubman.

What was Tubman thinking, seeing columns of Black northerners march by people tasting their first days of freedom.

In August 1865, Jourdon Anderson, a freedman living in Dayton, OH, addressed a letter to his former enslaver, Col. Patrick H. Anderson, in Tennessee. He wrote in response to a request from Patrick to return to work on the farm where he was enslaved just a year prior. 🧵

1/10 This correspondence was dictated by Jourdon to a local abolitionist, Valentine Winters, who submitted a copy of the letter to the Cincinnati Commercial. Over the next several months, Jourdon’s letter saw publication in newspapers across the US.

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Why does Reconstruction matter? This was a question that leaders of the civil rights movement, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr contemplated a century later. In February of 1968, Dr. King gave a speech memorializing historian Dr. W.E.B. DuBois. He said: 1/ "White historians had for a century crudely distorted the Negro’s role in the Reconstruction years. It was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history and the stakes were high. The Reconstruction was a period in which black men had a small measure of freedom of action...2/

#OTD in 1865 Gen. William T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15 from his HQ at the Charles Green house in Savannah, GA. Just a few days before, Sherman held a meeting with 20 representatives from the city’s African American churches.

1/4 All agreed, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor… We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own…”

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Four months into his term as President of the United States, on July 2, 1881, James A. Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau in a Washington, D.C. train station. After his successful presidential campaign in 1880 against Democratic candidate Winfield Scott Hancock, President Garfield emphasized the importance of ongoing Reconstruction and African American civil rights.

#OnThisDay June 30, 1872 the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was effectively disbanded by an act of Congress. During its lifespan between 1865 and 1872, as stated by historian and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, the Bureau “set going a system of free labor...it secured the recognition of Black freemen before courts of law; it founded the free public school in the South.”