Lessons and Resources

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, guarantees equal opportunity to all Americans. The amendment was an essential piece of "Radical Reconstruction," the period after the Civil War when the Republican majority in Congress passed laws and created systems meant to revolutionize life in the South and grant former slaves the rights and freedoms to which they were long denied. Former Confederate states had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in order to rejoin the Union. Reconstruction, though, did not ultimately transform life in the South. White southerners regained control of state governments and undermined the initial promises extended by Reconstruction.  Systemic racism and oppression prevailed in the 1870s, and persist into the present. The resources here- a packet on Reconstruction and Civil Rights and one on workers' rights and the dangers they face (using The Hamlet Fire as a case study) prompt students to analyze and question the systems that maintain oppression and put lives and freedoms at risk in the United States.