wRIGHTing Reconstruction–Doing Citizen History

“Every state is going to have its founding myths if you think of them as ideals.”

— Adolph Reed.

This is a new blog belonging to Rust College’s wRIGHTing Reconstruction history project. wRIGHTing Reconstruction was conceived in 2018 by two Humanities (English) professors at the College. In the year that followed, PBS aired “Reconstruction: America after the Civil War.” While that series aimed to tell a larger, national story of the years of national and local re-organization that followed the nation’s only hot Civil War, we believe that Reconstruction should also be investigated at state and even local levels.

wRIGHTing Reconstruction actually investigates the College’s founding in 1866 by the Freedmen’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. We are interested in discovering the mission of the Society in relation to the Church and in looking into the background and politics of the secretaries of the Society at Rust’s founding. Describing and thereby understanding the theology and sociology of the founding figures that were part of the church will lend depth and dimension to the early vision for the College.

We believe that a present not informed by deep treasures of the past misguides everyone and also leads to missed opportunities, especially in a time when culture and history are forces driving the information economy. In short, we believe that our very own students with encouragement and guidance of trained scholars can participate in the writing of new historical narratives.

Rust’s undergraduate students are in fact at the center of wRIGHTing Reconstruction. More than fifty first-year students entering Rust in 2019 were introduced to classic nineteenth-century texts including Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. The students, in addition, learned about journalist, educator, and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, who was born in Holly Springs, Miss., where Rust is located. The students read chapters from Sword among Lions, Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching along with W.E.B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk. These readings provided a broad, rather than short, view of the African-American transition from slavery to freedom.

In the second semester, a smaller group–of honors students–continued reading on the subject of Reconstruction, this time primary documents related to Reconstruction in Marshall County, Miss. These included papers from the American Missionary Association’s work in the county, Mississippi Circuit Riders, 1865-1965 by John H. Graham and two histories of Rust’s founding, the first by Webster B. Baker (1924) and the second by Ishmell Edwards (1993).

Graham’s book is part of the College’s Methodist Church archive and is an invaluable source for recovering people, places, and a story of Methodism in the state. The book, along with published and digitized minutes from early meetings of the Freedmen’s Aid Society, made it clear to us early on the central place of Methodism in Reconstruction in Mississippi. To be sure, it is a complicated relationship that includes definite progress and unfortunate fissures.

Students were assigned to create a database of names of persons referenced in the above texts in order that the project might further research them later, properly place them within local and national contexts, and cross-reference them across other related documents yet to be discovered.

All along, project organizers have intended that this significant historical work would serve the College’s purposes of offering an exciting liberal arts curriculum to present and future students and that the potential, revised narratives that will one day result from digging into the Reconstruction past would also encourage fresh discussion of history that is sensitive and contentious even in the present.

For instance, from transcribing AMA Papers–work done by first-year students Quento Odongo and Mariah Medina–the project discovered a second Reconstruction-era school, the work of Missouri Gill, wife of the director of the Marshall County Freedmen’s Bureau office–Nelson Gill. While the Gills are remembered by some local historians, continued variance over the aims of Reconstruction in general and over the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the county, in particular, had relegated the Gills to a trash heap of history. While the AMA Papers tell of the work of that organization, the AMA’s work in Marshall County is part of the same context in which Rust had its beginnings. The founding of the Langston School by Missouri Gill should not be seen as separate from Rust’s founding.

Our undergraduate researchers have gotten out into the Holly Springs community, advancing our project by working with the Marshall County Genealogy Society to bring local histories (written long ago) to bear on public memory of Reconstruction. Students have also been assigned the task of digitizing relevant documents and volumes found at the Marshall County Museum, a grant partner, along with the Genealogy Society, in wRIGHTing Reconstruction.

This is the task before us–to find as many pieces of the past as we can, to interpret them as objectively as we can, and then to weave together new narratives for the public, as well as for Rust itself. We are excited about the work, and we hope that the public ultimately will engage narratives to come. Otherwise, as political scientist Adolph Reed has rightly suggested, states will create founding myths in keeping with their ideals.