Reconstruction’s Reckoning: Grant vs. the Klan in the Fight for Equal Rights | The American Story | Ep 19

In the sweltering heat of July 30, 1866, a procession of around 200 Black men—many of them Union Army veterans—marched toward the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans. They carried the American flag. Inside, white and Black Republicans had gathered to rewrite Louisiana’s constitution to secure voting rights for Black men. The mayor, a former Confederate pardoned by President Andrew Johnson, declared the convention unlawful. The sheriff, also a former Confederate general, deputized a posse of ex-Confederates. The police and a white mob opened fire. Black men were beaten, shot, and stabbed as they surrendered. Some leaped from second-story windows and were killed on impact. By the time federal troops arrived, 34 Black men and three white Republicans were dead. General Philip Sheridan investigated and called it what it was: “an absolute massacre by the police.”

This episode of The American Story reconstructs the violent, tangled years of Reconstruction—a period in which the legal end of slavery did not mean the arrival of freedom. The central question was whether the United States would become a multiracial democracy or whether the old racial order would simply be rebuilt under new laws and terror.

The President Who Fought Reconstruction