Author Talk: Requiem for Reconstruction

Author Robert D. Bland sit downs with Dr. Adrienne Petty to discuss Black countermemory and related themes. Signed copies will be available! The Urban League of Hampton Roads Young Professionals are excited to host our first Author Talk and Book Signing event for Hampton Roads native and historical professor, Robert D. Bland. About the Book Requiem for Reconstruction chronicles Reconstruction’s legacy by focusing on key Black figures such as South Carolina congressman Robert Smalls, Judge William Whipper, writer Frances Rollin, and others who shaped postbellum Black America. Robert D. Bland traces the impact of the Reconstruction generation—Black Americans born between 1840 and 1870 who saw Reconstruction as a defining political movement and worked to preserve its legacy by establishing a new set of historical practices such as formulating new archives, shaping local community counternarratives, using the Black press to inform national audiences about Southern Republican politics, and developing a framework to interpret the recent past’s connection to their present world. Set in South Carolina’s Lowcountry—a hub of Black freedom, landownership, and activism—this book shows how late nineteenth-century Black leaders, educators, and journalists built a powerful countermemory of Reconstruction, defying the dominant white narrative that sought to erase their contributions. “This book’s exploration of the Reconstruction generation and the Black countermemory it built is a groundbreaking contribution to the field, successfully integrating Civil War and Reconstruction scholarship with African American political and intellectual history. It is an important, insightful, and exciting work.”—Amy Murrell Taylor, author of Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps