Dec 17, 2016 4 min read

In the course of his presidency, Barack Obama has approved the creation of national monuments for such pivotal figures in our history as the abolitionist Harriet Tubman and the Latino labor activist Cesar Chavez, as well as monuments marking crucial sites, such as a Japanese internment camp in Hawaii that was established during World War II and the area adjacent to the Stonewall Inn in New York, which is considered by many to be the birthplace of the modern LGBT civil rights movement.

With his time in the White House coming to an end one month from Tuesday, there have been calls for Obama to establish one more national monument before he journeys into memoir-writing and the lecture circuit – a monument that commemorates Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War when freed slaves in the South were inching toward equality and political power, but found those newfound rights snatched away when the North withdrew its oversight of the Confederacy and vicious Jim Crow laws were put in place. The chains of slavery may have been removed, but the former slaves and their descendants were placed in shackles of another kind, subject to brutal discrimination, servitude and second-class citizenship. It wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s, with the flowering of the civil rights movement and the approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year that African-Americans in the South – and, in other parts of the country, since the North and West were not immune to discrimination – started to achieve the full promise of American self-determination.

Writing in The New York Times last week, history professors Gregory P. Downs, Eric Foner and Kate Masur explained that Reconstruction “was the nation’s first great experiment in biracial democracy, with hundreds of thousands of black men able to vote for the first time, and significant numbers holding elective office,” and its history “remains a rich and troubling one for a nation that prefers stories of progress over those of regression. It reminds us of the centrality of race-based slavery to our nation’s history; of the idealism of those, white and black, who sought to build a society based on racial equality upon the ashes of slavery; and the violent overthrow of the experiment in biracial democracy. More broadly it reminds us that rights we sometimes take for granted can be taken away.”

If a monument comes to fruition, it might well end up in Beaufort County, South Carolina. In 1863, Tubman and U.S. forces freed slaves from plantations located nearby. The county also was the home of Robert Smalls, an activist who crafted legislation that gave South Carolina a free public education system – the first of its kind in the United States. Smalls also founded South Carolina’s Republican Party and served five terms in Congress, one of the first African-Americans to represent constituents on Capitol Hill.

Donald Trump first made his bones politically by questioning whether Obama was, in fact, an American citizen and if his presidency was legitimate. In the month since Trump was elected as Obama’s successor, some have wondered if we are witnessing a moment akin to Reconstruction. Will we see the rights of African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, Latinos, Muslims and others swept away in a wave of reaction? That remains to be seen. It will be up to Trump himself to determine if he wants to truly be a president for all Americans or sink into division and demagoguery.

In the meantime, the anxieties the Trump ascension has stoked make a Reconstruction monument all the more relevant and important.