A week before Christmas in 1983, two chemists at Yale University made a breakthrough that they thought could change the world. “It was like opening up a door and seeing a light,” one of the scientists, Stuart Schreiber, later told The New York Times. The pair had produced a substance, periplanone-B, that sends the male American cockroach into a thrashing, sexual frenzy.

What if this were used to build a better trap—a cockroach honeypot that lured bugs into a dish of poison? The implications were mind-bending. Cockroaches were overrunning U.S. cities in the 1980s—more than 2 billion lived in New York alone, according to the Times—and there was no good way of getting rid of them. Sprayed insecticides barely worked after decades’ worth of insect evolution. “Roach Motels” (glue traps, more or less) did next to nothing to prevent an infestation. My own family, like others living in apartments throughout New York City at the time, could only shrug at the roaches darting from our cupboards and crawling on the bathroom floor. I remember that my best friend’s parents had a gecko living underneath their fridge, supposedly for natural bug control. No doubt it was a fat and healthy lizard. The roaches were still legion.

So of course scientists producing a new roach attractant in a lab made the papers. Alas, the periplanone-B solution was just another failed idea—one of many bungled forays in a never-ending war. The bugs kept on marching through our homes, as they always had; they kept on laying all their hidden eggs. Yet again, the cockroach earned its reputation as the animal that could never, ever be wiped out.

But even as this disappointment faded, something unbelievable was just about to happen. A true miracle in roach control was already under way. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I speak with Hanna Rosin about a neglected achievement in the history of pest control.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. A few weeks ago, one of our science editors, Dan Engber, said he had a story to tell me. It’s a little weird, definitely gross. But it’s amazing. Here it is.

[Break]

Rosin: Well, first close the door behind you. Hey.

Daniel Engber: Hello.

Rosin: What’s up?

Engber: So I have a story about a scientific discovery made in very recent times that no one thought was possible, which changed the lives of millions.

Rosin: Ooh.

Engber: But no one remembers it.

Rosin: Wow. That sounds … fake? (Laughs.) Do you want to tell me what it is?

Engber: Sure. So this is a story of a forgotten solution, but also of a forgotten problem, and that problem is cockroaches.

Rosin: Cockroach—what do you mean cockroaches are a forgotten problem? I feel like I saw one recently.

Engber: Right. You saw one—one cockroach. In the 1980s, there were a lot of cockroaches everywhere. Cockroaches were like a national news story and almost like a public-health emergency. So there would be articles with various levels of alarmism about how the risk of being hospitalized with childhood asthma was three times higher in kids who were exposed to cockroach infestations.

There were stories about how cockroaches could carry the polio and yellow fever viruses.

Rosin: Okay. So cockroaches everywhere. Cockroaches bad for your health.

Engber: Cockroaches everywhere. Cockroaches bad for your health.

Cockroaches in the nation’s Capitol.

[News reel]

Tom Brokaw: Congress certainly has its hands full these days with the deficit, the MX, Central America, and now debugging.

Engber: So this is an NBC Nightly News story with Tom Brokaw from the spring of 1985, which is a very important moment in the history of cockroaches.

[News reel]

Interviewee: It’s very serious. The problem: They’re in our desks. They’re under tables. They’re everywhere.

Journalist: Some members of Congress are trying valiantly to fight back. Congressman Al McCandless has installed this black box in his office. It exudes a sexy scent, which attracts female roaches, which are then roasted by an electric grill.

Engber: I mean, I think just in that short clip you hear how completely helpless we were to deal with the cockroach problem. We were trying everything.

Rosin: Yes, it does have a “throw spaghetti at the wall” [feel]. Like, this is the nation’s Capitol and we can’t—we don’t really have an answer, nor is anyone pretending to. It’s just like, They tried this. They tried that.

[News reel]

Journalist: Congressman Silvio Conte, dressed to kill today, proclaimed a war on Capitol cockroaches. A company from his home district has donated 35,000 roach traps to the Capitol. But Conte said more help than that is needed.

Silvio Conte: And I want to appeal to the president of the United States. I am certain that President Reagan wants to get rid of as many troublesome cockroaches who are running around the halls of Congress as possible. So please join me in this war and squash one for the Gipper!

[Music]

Engber: But, you know, listening to all this kind of has an almost, like, a dreamy quality for me because I actually lived through this myself. Like, I was a child of the cockroach ’80s. I had cockroaches in my house all over the place too, and it’s almost, like, hard to remember how pervasive they were.

[Music]

Engber: So I grew up in New York City.

Rosin: Where?

Engber: In Morningside Heights.

Rosin: In an apartment?

Engber: In an apartment.

Rosin: Okay.

Engber: So, middle-class families in the 1980s in New York City had a lot of cockroaches, as I can say from personal experience—just a number of cockroaches that I think is unimaginable to younger people, to my younger colleagues here at The Atlantic.

Rosin: Against my—really, like, every fiber of my being, I’m going to say, “Paint me a picture.” (Laughs.)

Engber: They’d be all over the place all the time, like, in full view, in day, in night. Um, certainly if you went into the kitchen at night and turned on the light, they would scatter. It wouldn’t be like you’d see individual insects; you’d see, like, a wave pattern.

You and your brother, let’s say, might be taking the Cheerios out of the cabinet. And open it up, and pour it into the bowl, and cockroaches would come out with the Cheerios, which I think sounds really terrifying to today’s New Yorker. But at the time it was just, like, Time to get a new box of Cheerios.

There’s really this feeling that it was, like, a natural phenomenon—like an endless sense of being enveloped in roaches. Like, it was an atmosphere of roaches or an ocean.

You’re speechless.

Rosin: Just to weigh in, I do 100 percent relate. I grew up in an apartment in Queens, and exactly your memory. The only difference is that it was cornflakes and not Cheerios, but they were everywhere.

Although, you know what’s weird? I can’t seem to remember if they freaked me out or not. Like, did they freak you out? Did you scream when you saw cockroaches or call for your mommy? What did you do?

Engber: So, I don’t think we were that squeamish about them. In fact, I know we weren’t squeamish, because the other thing I remember vividly was my brother and I would play with the cockroaches. We would use our wooden blocks and build, like, obstacle courses, sort of, and try to do cockroach Olympics.

Rosin: Did you actually touch them with your fingers?

Engber: I mean, it’s kind of hard to imagine that I didn’t, but it must be the case. I mean, like I said, there’s sort of a dreamy quality to all this, where I almost doubt my own memories. And so just to do a kind of a gut check, I wanted to call my brother.

Ben Engber: Okay.

Daniel Engber: First of all, did we have cockroaches in our apartment growing up?

Ben Engber: We had a lot of cockroaches in our apartment growing up, and I, being a little bit older than you, remember it extremely clearly. But it still seems somewhat fantastical, the prevalence of cockroaches in our life.

Engber: Okay, so first I asked him about the cereal.

Rosin: Okay.

Ben Engber: I loved Rice Krispies. And they used to have, like, a slightly over-toasted Rice Krispie that was, like, a darker brown.

Daniel Engber: Yeah, the occasional brown one.

Ben Engber: The brown one. And I definitely remember a lot of arguments about whether something was an over-toasted Rice Krispie—a small over-toasted Rice Krispie—or a roach doody. And we would frequently have these arguments.

Rosin: (Laughs.) He’s, like, completely chill about the roach-doody-for-breakfast situation.

Engber: If only it was just the Rice Krispies, Hanna.

Ben Engber: We had the special medicine cups. They were sort of, like, plastic, hollow spoons.

Daniel Engber: Mm-hmm.

Ben Engber: And I remember one time, Mom poured whatever it was, probably Dimetapp or something like that, in and I saw something swimming in it.

Daniel Engber: Ooh.

Ben Engber: I was like, There’s a roach in there. I swear there’s a roach in there. And then she held it up to the light, and there was nothing in there. I didn’t want to take it. Finally she convinced me. I drank the whole thing.

I felt the roach crawling around all over my mouth.

Rosin: Oh, God!

Ben Engber: And I spit it all into the sink. And, uh, she said, Oh, there was a roach in it.

Roaches were just everywhere in our lives. So if we were constantly, like, throwing out something just cause a few roaches walked over it, we wouldn’t have anything.

Engber: So that’s how we lived, but here’s the important part from that conversation with Ben.

Daniel Engber: Do you remember if that was in apartment 44? I forget when we moved from apartment 44 to apartment 43.

Ben Engber: That was after. No, that was after it was solved, because we moved when I was 12 or 13, and it was, it was done by then.

Daniel Engber: Um, when you said that by that time the cockroach problem was solved, what’s your, what’s your memory of the solving of the problem in our home?

Ben Engber: Very simple: uh, Combat.

Engber: So, remember when I told you that the problem we forgot was roaches? This is the solution we forgot: Combat.

Rosin: Wait, you mean the Combat roach trap? Like, that little plastic disc where the roaches go in and then they die or something? Like, that’s what this is about?

Engber: Yes. That is the amazing American invention that we have all forgotten.

Rosin: The thing that sits in aisle 13 on the top shelf, that’s the amazing invention?

Engber: The thing that should be sitting in a museum.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Engber: The people who invented Combat are American heroes. They did something—I mean, you have to think about the fact that the cockroach was and is a symbol of indestructibility, right? This is the animal that’s going to outlive us after a nuclear war.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Engber: This is an—if you’ve ever seen WALL-E, it’s a postapocalyptic Earth. All that’s left is a robot and a cockroach.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Engber: It’s the animal that cannot be killed. And then in the 1980s, we did it. I think it’s fair to say that it solved the problem, and I don’t mean solved it completely and eliminated cockroaches forever, but really took a huge problem and made it much smaller. And that wasn’t just true in my apartment, but across the country. In fact, I found evidence that that is exactly what happened.

And so, I just was fascinated by the question of, Who did that?, and what it means that we don’t even really fully remember that it happened.

Rosin: Wait. There’s a who? Like, there’s a person who did that?

Engber: Yeah. Let me introduce you to a very important figure in the history of cockroaches.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: Who has a catchphrase, and his catchphrase is “Always bet on the roach.”

He’s, um, a member of the pest-management hall of fame.

Are you familiar with Pi Chi Omega, the fraternal organization dedicated to furthering the science of pest control?

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Engber: They have an annual scholarship called the Dr. Austin Frishman Scholarship.

Rosin: Ah. Wait, are we gonna hear from Austin Frishman himself?

Engber: Dr. Cockroach.

Rosin: Wow. Okay.

Austin Frishman: Hello?

Daniel Engber: Hi. Dr. Frishman?

Frishman: Speaking.

Engber: And so, I got him on the line, and he turns out to be sort of, like, a cockroach mystic almost.

Rosin: What is that?

Engber: Just, any question you ask, you might get an answer like this.

Frishman: I want you to picture a landfill, and it’s snowing. It’s about 28 degrees out, okay? And you’re there with seven or eight men, and you’re digging away at the snow because you’re teaching them how to bait on a landfill. Alright?

Daniel Engber: Mm-hmm.

Frishman: And then out of the snow in that cold comes American roaches running up, bubbling up—five, 10, 15, 60, 100, 200 from the smoldering heat down below.

Rosin: I love this man. He makes it seem, like, biblical. So where does this cockroach mystic, Dr. Frishman, fit into this story?

Engber: You know, Frishman is in the story almost from the very start. In 1985, and in the lead up to 1985, Frishman had been hired by a company called American Cyanamid. And American Cyanamid researchers had this product that they were selling for use in controlling fire ants.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: And the researchers in their, you know, industrial-products division were aware of the fact that this fire ant poison worked on cockroaches. And, in fact, they used it in the lab to control cockroaches.

Rosin: Their own cockroach problem?

Engber: Yes. Yeah, they put it in peanut butter, and they put it around the lab, just so they could continue to do their work on fire ants.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: Um, but then the company was, you know, making this effort to try to figure out, Well, can we repurpose some of our industrial products for a consumer use? And so forth. So, you’ve got a hot, new roach-control product. Who do you call?

Rosin: Oh!

Engber: Austin Frishman.

Rosin: Yes. Austin Frishman.

Frishman: And I said, “Well, it’s going to be difficult, and it may not work.” And they said to me, “Listen. Do you want to do the project or not?” I said, “No. I’ll do it just so you know what we’re up against.”

Engber: Okay, so everything we had up until that point were these, you know, these insecticides that we’d just been using for years. And the roaches had just developed resistance to them. Even if you, you know, you killed 99 percent of them, the ones you didn’t kill would have some mutation that protected them or they’d have a thicker shell or something, a thicker exoskeleton, and they’d survive and reproduce. And now your insecticides weren’t working anymore.

Rosin: Right. So they would just keep outsmarting us?

Engber: Right. And so one of the things about this new product that made it different from the old ones was it wasn’t just a spray that you’d put in the corners. It’s actually a bait. That little, black disc had something in it that sort of tasted like oatmeal cookie that roaches loved, and they would come in and get it and then take it out.

Philip Koehler: We were filming the cockroaches, and we found that only 25 percent of the cockroaches ate the bait, but 100 percent of the cockroaches would die.

Engber: That’s Philip Koehler. He’s another cockroach expert. And what he’s talking about here is the fact that, like, this stuff would kill roaches that hadn’t even eaten it.

Rosin: Like, what do you mean? How?

Engber: Well, that’s what I asked Phil Koehler.

Koehler: It was a slow-acting toxicant that allowed transfer to other members of the colony.

Daniel Engber: Wait. They would regurgitate it? Or how does it get transferred?

Koehler: Well, there are several mechanisms of transfer. The main one would be that cockroaches will eat another cockroach’s poop. It was actually after this work with Combat baits that it became, uh, known that cockroaches actually feed poop to their young.

Rosin: Amazing. I love it when researchers are put in a position where they have to say words like poop, but just very seriously. (Laughs.)

Koehler: And there are actually other methods of transfer of toxicant as well. There is, like you said, regurgitation, where they get sick and they regurgitate some, and other cockroaches will come and feed on that vomit. Uh, there’s also cannibalism, where a cockroach will attack another cockroach and eat it. And there’s also, uh, necrophagy, where the cockroaches will eat the dead.

Rosin: Each method more charming than the next. (Laughs.)

Engber: Yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay.

Engber: Vomit, poop, or cannibalism.

Rosin: This seems exciting.

Engber: (Laughs.)

Rosin: No, I mean, if I were them, this would be really exciting. Like, I’m just imagining them, you know, like in Oppenheimer, sort of sitting in their lab, like, figuring out every element of this. How are we gonna make it safe? How’s it gonna work? It’s exciting.

Engber: Yeah, they were on the verge of something big.

Frishman: We would run to the lab early in the morning to see the results from the night before, or stay up half the night and watch. And we began to see, you know, what was happening. In the beginning, I was hesitant and the whole thing. But as we began to do the work and I saw the results first in the lab, it was a breakthrough. Okay?

Engber: Frishman was among the first to take this breakthrough product, put it in a syringe, take it out of the lab, and start using it in restaurants and diners to see if it worked.

Frishman: I went into a small diner, a little luncheonette place, and a bunch of guys were sitting and eating sandwiches, and I was behind the counter, so I was down low. And I had the bait, and I saw the roaches in a crack, and I just put a little dab. And as I went to go do it, the roaches started coming out, and they were gobbling it up.

Daniel Engber: You, uh, saw in real time them come to the bait.

Frishman: I was the first person in the world. I was shaking, okay? I’m telling you, I was shaking. I still have that syringe, that original one.

[Music]

Engber: This is the moment. This is the brink of the relatively roach-free world that we live in today. Now we had the little black discs, I would say, you know, two inches across or something.

Rosin: With an entrance and an exit.

Engber: With an entrance. With an entrance and an exit.

Frishman: I had written a book called The Cockroach Combat Manual, so that’s how it got its name.

Engber: And Frishman is going to take this product on the road.

Frishman: People would write in with horror stories, and they won a prize: the product and me. And we would go into those places and knock out the population.

Engber: So, he takes this to Texas. He takes it to Georgia. They do an event at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. They go to the Capitol. Remember the Tom Brokaw report? Those are Combat traps. And then ads start appearing on television.

[Compilation of Combat advertisements]

Engber: So this wasn’t just a marketing campaign. I mean, the product really did work.

Rosin: What do you mean, it worked?

Engber: Well, cockroach numbers were going down—you can find signs everywhere. Actually, a guy I went to high school with wrote an article for The New York Times in 2004, and he reported that there had been a survey of federal buildings and their cockroach complaints between 1988 and 1999—so this is Combat rollout era—and the number of complaints fell by 93 percent.

Rosin: Wow.

Engber: I also found a 1991 story from The New York Times—again, right in that Combat zone—and a New York City housing official is quoted as saying, “There was a time when people were horrified at roaches running rampant, and now everybody keeps saying, ‘Where did they go to?’”

Rosin: So it’s a thing. It’s, like, an actual, documented thing.

Engber: Yeah.

Rosin: And yet it’s not a huge moment? Like, there aren’t a lot of stories saying, Yay, us. We have conquered the cockroach problem?

Engber: No, there are not. There are stories about Combat success as almost like a business case study.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: There are stories that remark upon the fact that there are fewer cockroaches than there used to be.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

But nothing that’s like, This enormous, giant, urban problem has finally been solved by this ragtag crew of amazing scientists.

Engber: (Laughs.) Nothing of that nature.

There’s a reason why I had to introduce Austin Frishman to you as a member of the pest-management hall of fame. And you weren’t like, Oh, you mean the guy on the back of the quarter?

Rosin: Yeah. (Laughs.) Right. But why?

Engber: I mean, that is the question that has been keeping me up at night. And I have some ideas.

Rosin: Dan, you said you had some ideas about why this discovery didn’t get the credit and hoopla that it deserved.

Engber: So my brother had a good theory about this. I said, How come just our family—why didn’t we celebrate and go to dinner or something? The roaches are gone. He said, Well, it’s because we just assumed they would come back.

Rosin: Hmm.

Engber: So I think that must be part of it, right? That there was like, Oh, this new thing works. But yeah, everything works the first time you do it.

So there was never one moment where you realized that the world had changed.

Or it could be that, you know, when things change for better, we just have a tendency to just accept the new, better reality and pretend the old thing didn’t happen. Hey, that’s done. I’d rather not discuss it.

Rosin: Like, what’s an example of that?

Engber: The Spanish flu, for example. There’s a famous gap in art and literature about the Spanish flu. There’s not a great literature of this cataclysmic event in the 19-teens. You’d think there would be, but there isn’t. Why not?

Rosin: Probably because it was traumatic. And actually, you know, I think that’s similar to the experience with cockroaches. When, at least in my memory, when I was living with them, it wasn’t just, like, gross or annoying or an inconvenience. It’s really unsettling. Like, it lives as this constant undercurrent of anxiety and a sense that you just don’t have control over things. It’s like a terrible feeling.

Engber: Like a free-floating, pervasive anxiety hanging over you at all times.

Rosin: Yes. Yes.

Engber: Can we talk about the Cold War for a second?

Rosin: Uh, yeah?

Engber: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: So, we were talking about how the cockroach was this, um, symbol of indestructibility that would outlast us in the event of nuclear war.

Rosin: Yeah?

Engber: This was—I mean, the cockroach was—in a way, a symbol of the Cold War. Like, the nuclear-disarmament groups would put ads in the newspaper with just a picture of a cockroach.

Rosin: Hmm.

Engber: To try to, you know, be like, Wake up, America. We have to disarm now, or this is the future.

Rosin: So it all just got blended in our heads—like, nuclear war anxiety, cockroach anxiety.

Engber: Yes. And then those two anxieties were being unwound at almost exactly the same time. Just to be frank, this is a highly tenuous theory, but I do want to line these things up.

So, you know, 1985, the Tom Brokaw report, the Combat is coming out. Spring of 1985, that’s also when Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power.

In fact, Silvio Conte—the congressman who on the steps of the Capitol is saying, “Squash one for the Gipper,” touting Combat traps, which are manufactured in his district—five days later he’s in Moscow for a historic meeting with Gorbachev at the Kremlin. That is considered a watershed moment in the wind down of the Cold War.

Silvio Conte: Gorbachev says, “At the present time, our relationship is in an ice age.” However, he said, “Spring is a time of renewal.”

Engber: I’m just saying the guy wearing the exterminator outfit on the steps of the Capitol, touting Combat, gave Ronald Reagan the advice to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Rosin: Like, in the span of a week?

Engber: In less than a week. In less than a week he was in Moscow. And you start to see Combat traps are, you know, spreading through the country as glasnost is spreading through the USSR.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Engber: And in the years that follow, we have the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those are exactly the years when the cockroach populations are finally diminishing, when we’re winning the war on cockroaches and we’re winning the Cold War. It’s happening concurrently.

Rosin: So what you’re saying is our nuclear fears dissipate. Our cockroach fears dissipate. And what?

Engber: What I’m saying is it was the cockroach that took over the imagination as this thing. They made sense to stand in for nuclear fears.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: And then going the other way, once we were free of that nuclear anxiety, we just sort of glided into a roach-free world.

[Music]

Engber: Okay, Hanna. There’s one more thing.

Um, so the roaches are coming back.

Rosin: No.

Engber: I’m sorry to say.

Rosin: What?

Engber: It seems clear that the roaches are coming back, but it has taken a really long time, right? So it’s true that they couldn’t develop biological resistance to the poison.

But then roaches did develop what’s called a behavioral resistance to the baits.

Basically, roaches stopped preferring sweet foods. So, the poison would still kill them, but they weren’t interested in the oatmeal-cookie bait in the center of the Combat trap.

So, roach numbers are slowly going up again. And if you read publications of the Pest Management Association newsletter, which maybe I’ve done recently, you can see that there’s, you know, there’s some chatter about how roach calls are increasing.

Okay, so I pulled some numbers. I went to the American Housing Survey from the federal government. In 2011, 13.1 million estimated households had signs of cockroaches in the last 12 months. In 2021, 14.5 million.

Rosin: Hmm.

Engber: So, creeping. That’s the word: creeping. The numbers are creeping upward.

Rosin: Does that raise the possibility that future generations—my children, their children—will actually have to contend with roaches?

Engber: They might. It’s possible. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say it’s also a little bit appealing in a way.

Rosin: No. Did you say appealing?

Engber: Well, okay. This came up when I was talking to my brother.

Daniel Engber: What’s the attitude of your children towards cockroaches?

Ben Engber: My children are total wusses about it. They run away and they scream. Shosh is terrified of insects.

Daniel Engber: Is she better or worse for that?

Ben Engber: I would say she’s worse for that.

Rosin: I mean, isn’t that what everyone says? Like, We were the toughest generation, and everything has gone downhill since then. I mean, I feel that there’s a little bit of that in this conversation we’re having.

Engber: Yes. That is exactly the conversation we’re having. And it’s embarrassing but true. I can’t shake it. Like, I have some pride in the fact that we did the Roach Olympics. It might be a ridiculous thing to be proud of, but I feel like we were being imaginative and fearless and having fun.

My kids are imaginative and have fun. They are not fearless.

Ben Engber: Falling to pieces at the sight of an insect does not strike me as a healthy way to attack life. As a species, we would not have made it very far if just a little filth took us out. And maybe the roachy upbringing is what instilled that in me.

Daniel Engber: So you’re pro-roach. Mom has been vindicated for feeding you a roach in medicine.

Ben Engber: Oh, yeah. Mom is absolutely vindicated.

Rosin: So the thing you’re actually nostalgic for is both freedom and maybe even a little bit of courage.

Engber: Yeah, but, you know, it’s more than that. Not only did my brother and I get to enjoy the feeling of being unafraid of cockroaches, we also got to enjoy the feeling of things getting better.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: An intractable problem gets solved. And I feel like that’s, you know, that’s a really nice lesson to learn, even as a kid. And unfortunately, I don’t know that my kids have had many opportunities to learn that specific lesson. So I’m nostalgic for that, too.

[Music]

Rosin: You know what, Dan?

Engber: Yeah?

Rosin: I think that it’s time that me and you and your brother go and have our celebratory dinner that we never had all those years ago. Like, instead of going to a steakhouse, we’ll just each get bowls of cereal. Bowls of cereal for everyone.

Engber: Rice Krispies.

Rosin: Yeah.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Ethan Brooks. It was edited by Jocelyn Frank, fact-checked by Michelle Ciarrocca, and engineered by Rob Smierciak.

Special thanks to Sam Schechner for his roach reporting in The New York Times.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Does Nikki Haley really have a shot at beating Donald Trump? Does any Republican?

On Monday afternoon, a basketball gym in Bluffton, South Carolina, was packed with people who had come to hear Haley’s latest sales pitch. Hundreds more were waiting outside. No Republican candidate besides Trump can reliably draw more than a thousand attendees, but about 2,500 showed up for Haley. (Granted, this speech was in Haley’s home state, where she formerly served as governor. Also, the gym was a stone’s throw from the Sun City retirement community, a place where, gently speaking, people may have had nothing better to do at 2 p.m. on a Monday.) One of Haley’s volunteers told me this weekday event had originally been booked at a nearby restaurant, but that, given the current excitement of the campaign, organizers pivoted to the gym, on the University of South Carolina at Beaufort campus. Everyone in Haley’s orbit is understandably riveted. She’s squarely challenging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for second place in the Republican presidential primary, no matter how second that place may be.

While the former president still floats high above his dwindling field of competitors, Haley is the only person who keeps rising in the polls. Her climb is steady, not a blip. Haley’s campaign and super PAC are planning to spend $10 million on advertisements over the next eight weeks across Iowa and New Hampshire. On Tuesday, she received an endorsement from the Koch brothers’ network, Americans for Prosperity Action, and along with it an undisclosed amount of financial support. (It will be a lot.) But this year-end, all-in effort to stop Trump ignores the fact that he is a singular vortex, a once-in-a-century figure, a living martyr with a traveling Grateful Dead–like roadshow. His abhorrent behavior and legal woes do not matter. Three weeks ago, at his rally in South Florida, vendors told me that items with Trump’s mug shot are their biggest sellers. How does a mere generational figure, as her supporters hope Haley might be, compete with that?

Haley bounded up onstage in a light-blue blazer and jeans. “We’ve been through a lot together,” she told the crowd. She meandered back and forth—no lectern, no teleprompter. When you ask people what they like about her, many point to her presence, her poise. Haley delivers her stump speech in a singsong voice. A few words, a pause, a smile. Speaking to the Low Country crowd, she seemed to be thickening her southern accent and peppering in a few extra-emphatic finger points for good measure. She’s just a down-home, neighborly southerner whose most recent job happened to be in Manhattan, serving at the United Nations. The volunteer who had bragged to me about the venue change later pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of himself and Haley at a wedding reception. He pointed to her bare feet. She’s so real, he said.

[Read: Nikki Haley offers an alternate reality]

Several women in the audience were wearing pink shirts with a Margaret Thatcher quote on the back: If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman. Sue Ruby, a 74-year-old attendee from nearby Savannah, Georgia, was wearing a WOMEN FOR NIKKI button on her sweater. “I feel like we’ve given men a lot of years to straighten our society out, and they haven’t done so great, so let’s try a woman,” she said. Ruby told me she’s a Republican who begrudgingly voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the past two elections because she viewed Trump as a threat to democracy. A Sun City resident named Lorraine, age 79, told me that “it’s time for a woman,” but that she would nevertheless vote for Trump if he wins the nomination. “I don’t want to vote for the opposite,” she said, refusing to say Biden’s name. Carolyn Ballard, an 80-year-old woman from Hilton Head, South Carolina, told me she’s a lifelong Republican who voted for Trump twice, but that she believes he’s past his prime and that Haley is her candidate. “He just irritates people and he stirs up a lot of trouble,” she said of Trump. “Although he’s very smart, and he did a lot for the country. I mean, everybody was happy when he was president.”

Haley doesn’t lean as hard into gender dynamics as past female presidential candidates have. Nevertheless, she skillfully uses her womanhood and Indian heritage as setups for certain lines. “I have been underestimated in everything I’ve ever done,” she told the room. “And it’s a blessing, because it makes me scrappy. No one’s going to outwork me in this race. No one’s going to outsmart me in this race.” Or this: “Strong girls become strong women, and strong women become strong leaders,” which had a surprise left turn: “And none of that happens if we have biological boys playing in girls’ sports.” (Huge applause.)

Courting Never Trump voters, exhausted Trump voters, and, yes, even some likely Trump voters simultaneously is not an easy trick. She hardly ever criticizes her former boss. Here’s her most biting critique from Monday: “I believe President Trump was the right president at the right time … and I agree with a lot of his policies. But the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” (Note the passivity; she won’t even say Trump catalyzes the chaos.) Having already served as his ambassador to the UN, she may be under consideration for vice president. Compared with his attacks on Ron DeSantis, Trump has gone relatively soft on her, opting for the mid-century misogynistic slight “birdbrain.” Like most of her competitors, Haley has said she would pardon him.

Whereas Trump has tacked authoritarian and apocalyptic, Haley has mostly kept her messaging grounded. At the rally, she bemoaned the price of groceries and gas. “Biden worries more about sagebrush lizards than he does about Americans being able to afford their energy,” she quipped. (She also called out her fellow Republicans for adding to the deficit.) She’s a military wife, and spoke about her husband’s PTSD and the persistent problem of homeless veterans. Though she lacks Trump’s innate knack for zingers, she landed one about how things might change if members of Congress got their health care through the VA: “It’ll be the best health care you’ve ever seen, guaranteed.”

Although many of her fellow Republicans have adopted a nativist view of the world, Haley waxes at length about America’s geopolitical role. (And subsequently gets tagged as a globalist.) “The world is literally on fire,” she said Monday. She affirmed her support for both Israel and Ukraine, and went long on the triple threat of Russia, China, and Iran, paying particular attention to China as a national-security issue. In doing so, knowingly or not, she began to sound quite Trumpy. “They’re already here. They’ve already infiltrated our country,” Haley said. “We’ve got to start looking at China the way they look at us.” She called for an end to normal trade relations with China until they stop “murdering” Americans with fentanyl. She chastened the audience with images of China’s 500 nuclear warheads and its rapidly expanding naval fleet. “Dictators are actually very transparent. They tell us exactly what they’re going to do,” she said.

Perhaps Haley’s biggest advantage right now is her relative youth. She’ll turn 52 three days before the New Hampshire primary. Trump has lately been making old-man gaffes, drawing comparisons to Biden, who was first elected to the Senate the year Haley was born. She speaks wistfully of “tomorrow,” of leaving certain things—unspecified baggage—in the past. “You have to go with a new generational leader,” Haley proclaimed. Onstage, she endorsed congressional term limits and the idea of mental-competency tests for public servants older than 75. The Senate, she joked, had become “the most privileged nursing home in the country.” Throwing shade at both Trump and Biden, she spoke of the need for leaders at “the top of their game.” Hundreds of gray-and-white-haired supporters before her nodded and murmured in approval.

Monday’s event took place roughly 90 miles south of Charleston, where, in 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church, hoping to start a race war. At the time, Haley was governor of South Carolina, and Trump—who had descended the golden escalator and announced his candidacy for president just the day before—still seemed like a carnival act. Photos of Roof posing with a Confederate flag ricocheted across social media. Haley had the flag taken down from the South Carolina statehouse, a reversal from her earlier position on the flag. Five years later, after the murder of George Floyd, Haley tweeted that, “in order to heal,” Floyd’s death “needs to be personal and painful for everyone.” During Monday’s rally, though, she sounded much more like an old-school Republican: “America’s not racist; we’re blessed,” she said. “Our kids need to love America. They need to be saying the Pledge of Allegiance when they start school.”

As her audience grows, she continues to tiptoe along a very fine line: not MAGA, not anti-MAGA. In lieu of Trump-style airbrushed fireworks and bald eagles and Lee Greenwood, she’s going for something slightly classier (leaving the stage to Tom Petty’s “American Girl”) while still seizing every opportunity to own the libs. At the rally, she attacked the military’s gender-pronoun training and received substantial applause. “We’ve got to end this national self-loathing that’s taken over our country,” she said. Early in her speech, she promised that she would speak hard truths. As she approached her conclusion, one hard truth stuck out: “Republicans have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president. That is nothing to be proud of. We should want to win the majority of Americans.” It was the closest thing to a truly forward-thinking message that any serious Republican has offered this cycle.

In the most generous of interpretations, the race for the GOP nomination is now among three people: Haley, DeSantis, and Trump. Mike Pence is already out. Tim Scott, Haley’s fellow South Carolinian, dropped out two weeks ago. Vivek Ramaswamy, who has struggled to break out of single digits in the polls, recently rented an apartment in Des Moines and will almost certainly stay in the race through the Iowa caucuses. Ramaswamy has also unexpectedly become Haley’s punching bag: Her campaign said she pulled in $1 million in donations after calling him “scum” during the last debate.

At next week’s debate in Alabama, the stage will likely be winnowed to Ramaswamy, Haley, and DeSantis. (“When the stage gets smaller, our chances get bigger,” Haley told her rally crowd.) DeSantis seems to be betting his whole campaign on Iowa, and has secured the endorsement of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. This weekend, DeSantis will complete his 99-county tour of the state. Haley needs to beat DeSantis, but she also needs his voters if she has any serious shot of taking on Trump. If DeSantis drops out before Haley, his supporters are far more likely to flock to Trump. So maybe Haley needs a deus ex machina. In 2020, Biden’s campaign was viewed as all but cooked when, here in South Carolina, with the help of Representative Jim Clyburn, everything turned around, propelling him to Super Tuesday and the nomination.

Haley’s campaign declined to let her speak with me. A spokesperson, Olivia Perez-Cubas, instead emailed me the following statement: “Poll after poll show Nikki Haley is the best challenger to Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That’s why the largest conservative grassroots coalition in the country just got behind her. Nikki is second in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and is the only candidate with the momentum to go the distance. Ron DeSantis has a short shelf life with his Iowa-or-bust strategy.”

[David A. Graham: Nikki Haley is the new Ron DeSantis]

As rally-goers made their way to the parking lot, I struck up conversation with a man in a T-shirt that read NOPE NOT AGAIN, with Trump’s hair and giant red necktie decorating the O. He wore a camouflage baseball hat with an American flag on the dome. The man, Mike Stevens, told me he was a 25-year Army veteran, and that he was disgusted with Trump.

“He’s a bully. He’s not good. He causes hate and discontent,” Stevens said. “I mean, he didn’t uphold the Constitution. And now we’ve had a judge say that. First time ever—no peaceful transfer of power? Even Al Gore did it. I’ve always been a Republican, but if it’s him and Biden, I’ll vote for Biden, I guess.”

He was excited about Haley, and had been texting his friends and family about her rally—trying to wean them off their Trump addiction. But he also told me he had written Haley a letter: He was dismayed by her promise to pardon Trump, and he needed her to know that.

The Grammy-winning rapper is accused of co-founding a violent street gang in Atlanta, Georgia.

The lack of respect for the dead surprised even a soldier with the Wagner Group, Russia’s mercenary legion of former convicts that fought some of the bloodiest battles in the invasion of Ukraine. He looked at an ugly heap of wooden crosses and flower wreaths that had been pushed aside and cursed the authorities.

“What are you doing? They died for Russia, and you are razing their graves to the ground. You are rolling over them,” he said in a video shot at the time, pointing at the wreckage.

Workers were pouring concrete over a Wagner cemetery near the southern Russian city of Samara on August 24, part of Moscow’s punishment for the private army’s one-day mutiny in June. Not many in Russia noticed the soldier’s distress. Layers of injustice and mass killings go so far and so deep into Russia’s history that most of us have lost track. In Ukraine, the Russian army often leaves its dead soldiers behind.

Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, admitted that at least 20,000 of his soldiers had died in what he called the “meat-grinder operation” that had destroyed the once-charming eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and finally captured its ruins in May. Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, one of Wagner’s co-founders, were then killed in a mysterious plane crash in August, their once familiar faces melting into oblivion. The hypocrisy and the indifference of many Russians were astonishing: President Vladimir Putin first sold Prigozhin’s paramilitary fighters to the country as “heroes.” Then he made them disappear, their graves paved over and crosses knocked down, forgotten even by the earth.

[Graeme Wood: The mercenary always loses]

In Russia, people speak of breaking through another bottom, to the next level of bad. That is where the country of my birth has now arrived. Generations of Ukrainians will remember Russians as serial killers, while in Russia, the anti-war protests have faded away. The secret services, in the fashion of the oprichniki guards of the old czars, sow terror at home while much of Russia turns away and sleeps. I look back now at Russia’s fleeting period of hope, and I wonder what has happened to the oxygen we breathed. Because even the air can be poisoned, I have learned, until indifference and fear become its essence.

Like many Soviet children, I grew up longing to travel. I studied the globe, learned languages, and dreamed of hearing the stories foreigners might tell. I became a reporter, first working in Moscow, then moving to Portland, Oregon, with my husband and son in the early aughts.

To my surprise, in the United States, nostalgia would sometimes flood me out of nowhere. I could be walking in some American park blooming with roses, thinking that I would give everything to be in a dank underpass in St. Petersburg or on the floor of a friend’s apartment covered in cigarette butts, listening to live music.

[Read: Russia’s twin nostalgias]

The changes I saw on television, I ached to witness on the ground: activists pushing against dictatorships in Belarus and Central Asia, national movements rising in the Caucasus, religious communities coalescing in Siberia. I wanted to learn about China’s new business interests in the far east of Russia, and to meet the shaman with six fingers on one hand who worshiped on the shores of Lake Baikal. Some KGB archives opened: The country was learning about its past crimes. One could so easily fall into the trap of believing that Russia was free.

And so my family and I moved to Russia from the United States in 2005. We saw no sign of Russia’s impending catastrophe. The capital was alive with tourists, artists, and businessmen from all over the world. At the opening of a basement theater for plays with political themes, I saw actors mock Putin without fear.

But all was not really quiet during those years. Chechnya was rebuilding from ruins after a decade-long war with the Russian army that killed thousands of people. As a correspondent for Newsweek, I covered terrorist attacks, armed conflicts, and KGB-style repression in the post-Soviet democracies. Still, in Moscow, the word stukach, or “informer,” sounded like a relic of an earlier time. Russia was awake, voting, protesting.

As a reporter, I wanted to get behind the country’s polished facade and look into what Russians call glubinkas, or “little depths”—the remote and miserable corners of a country’s life. I covered neo-Nazi groups, asbestos mines, provincial youth facing unemployment, and the temptations of a life in crime. I went to the Arctic, to the border with China, to places that many in Moscow considered godforsaken in their obscurity; but on coming back to Moscow, I began to bear witness to the gathering of a much worse darkness still.

Journalists often walk the paths where good is losing to evil. I stepped along those byways, saw victims, and reported on crimes against ordinary people. Some were my friends. Natalia Estemirova, or simply Natasha, lived in Grozny. She was an investigative reporter and a human-rights defender, as well as a single mother of a 15-year-old girl. During the Second Chechen War, I stayed at her house, its walls pocked with holes from shrapnel, the two of us talking late into the night. She told me about the dozens of abductions she had documented in what she described as a growing epidemic, crimes for which no one was held accountable.

On July 15, 2009, Natasha was herself abducted in broad daylight in front of her house. The men who pushed her into an unmarked Lada have never been identified or prosecuted. A few hours later, her bullet-riddled body was found on the side of the road. Together with a small group of journalists and human-rights defenders, I went to Chechnya to accompany her hearse along Vladimir Putin Avenue, Grozny’s sinisterly named central boulevard. Perhaps the people she’d helped during the war were too afraid of Chechnya’s brutal leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, to join us. Or were they indifferent? That day, one of Kadyrov’s aides told me that if I didn’t leave Chechnya immediately, I, too, would be made to disappear.  

During Putin’s first two terms in office, we journalists often went to such funerals for our assassinated colleagues: Anna Politkovskaya, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, and others. These were restive years, especially 2011 and 2012. Russia had seen enough of Putin, his war in Georgia, his penchant for repression that smacked of an earlier era. Protesters ventured into city squares; Muscovites sought out sources of independent news on paper and television. But activists and their leaders started to be arrested, and statues of Felix Dzerzhinsky and Stalin sprang up around the country. I remember a feeling of suffocation, as if somebody were pumping the oxygen away. That feeling was one I had experienced as a child.

[Read: How Russian journalists dealt with fake news]

“This city has clogged pores, this city has shut up mouths, telephone calls are like confessions of mutiny,” my father wrote in a 1979 poem about my hometown. Now all of Russia began to seem that way, as though it were heading back to the 1970s. The number of informers was rapidly growing: People called “hotlines” to report on their neighbors to authorities. I sometimes felt that we told the truth only at the funerals of our assassinated friends. And I questioned my past nostalgia: Was this what Russia had been all along?

Then Boris Nemtsov, a democratic politician, one of the very best Russia had, with my last name but who was no relation, was shot in the back on a sidewalk within sight of the Kremlin walls.

Nemtsov and I come from the same town: Gorky, which means “bitter.” Soviet society, down to the children, was well trained to hunt down and condemn people who stood out. And so my classmates refused to play with me in the summer of 1979 because my mother had a big, curly Afro perm, loved Boney M., wore bell-bottom pants of her own design, and drove a tiny Zaporozhets car. She was one of the first women to drive in our city. In a photograph I adore, she is standing on top of that car, brave and free, in her colorful overalls, waving to us.

Life in my hometown was hidden from foreign eyes and organized, like some ill-omened nesting doll, in layers of secrecy. Scientists under the pressure of classified work agreements developed military technologies in army bases and scientific institutes within the closed city. The U.S.S.R. had at least 40 such towns, and some of them are still not open, meaning that to visit them as a nonresident, you need a permit.  

Growing up in that run-down, grim, secretive, industrial place, I imagined that one day, something magical would happen there. And something did: Nemtsov, a skinny physicist with messy hair, appeared. He was charismatic, unusual, reminding me of my parents and many of their friends—intellectuals who longed for freedom, justice, transparency, and travel.

Boris Nemtsov came to our home when I was 13, and he was the first true democrat I ever heard speak. He was a scientist researching quantum physics, designing antennas for spaceships at the local Radiophysical Research Institute. My dad was a young reporter, his articles constantly censored or banned. I remember a door marked Censor in the smoky hallway of his newsroom on Figner Street.

My father had called Nemtsov in the course of reporting a story about a half-built nuclear-power plant in Gorky. The site was visible from our balcony on the eighth floor of a concrete apartment block. The project’s plans revealed dangerous construction flaws that my father investigated. He interviewed the young scientist Nemtsov for this story, and the two teamed up to stop the nuclear project just one year before the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

“Everything Nemtsov said was unusual; nobody spoke like him,” my father later told me. “He understood the internal direction at a time when there were no politics in the U.S.S.R. He was a born politician.”

In the last years of the Soviet Union, the KGB tried to recruit Nemtsov to spy on a Jewish physicist in his institute in exchange for business trips to foreign conferences, Boris’s widow, Raisa Nemtsova, told me recently: “They knew that he was so open that nobody would think he was an agent, and at the same time, that he had ambitions, which gave them hopes. But they received a firm no from him.”

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Nemtsov became the governor of our town, opened it to foreign visitors, and restored its historical name, Nizhny Novgorod. As a political figure, Nemtsov said no to wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. To stop the First Chechen War, Governor Nemtsov collected hundreds of thousands of signatures on a letter to President Boris Yeltsin: “For many months in a row, blood has been shed and people have been dying in Chechnya, nonstop. The war is killing our children, killing our future, distorting and twisting our country, giving birth to enemies and hate.”

Nemtsov later said that he did not have much hope that Yeltsin would pay attention to the petition from Nizhny Novgorod. But 1 million residents of Nizhny Novgorod, a region with a population of just 3.5 million, put their signatures under that letter next to Nemtsov’s. The governor went all the way to the Kremlin with a minibus full of signed petitions. He went on to become one of the most important politicians in the Russian opposition, speaking out against the country’s autocratic turn and its first incursions into Ukraine.

When Nemtsov was shot in Moscow in 2017, the Kremlin tried five Chechen men for the killing, a sideshow meant to distract from the real reason for his death. The governor of  Nizhny Novgorod, Valery Shantsev, said nothing. No governor in Russia in 2017 would have dared to write an open letter to Putin and sign it with their own name. When I looked at Russia then, I saw a land of unconcern—a hand that waves as if to say “Who cares?”

Who cared when my best friend from school, Lena, was murdered by her husband in their apartment in Avtozavod, a depressing, industrial district of Nizhny Novgorod, built for workers at the city’s car plant? Lena’s neighbors could hear her screams but did not call the police, friends said. “Why bother? Many neighbors drink, scream, and beat each other,” one friend told me in 2010.

The same indifference extended to Katia Popova’s apartment building, also in Avtozavod. Katia’s mother locked her inside their tiny flat when the girl was just 13. Ten years later, plumbers discovered a tall 23-year-old who had come of age connected to this world only by a radio. Neighbors were aware of the girl living behind seven locks but were too afraid of the mother to get involved.

Something was wrong in my hometown. Putin’s Russia had decriminalized domestic violence, so why should neighbors intervene—even when a man was locked inside an apartment to starve to death, or the woman next door was being killed?

Then came another blow to what remained of civic life. On February 24, 2022, free-spirited critics of the Kremlin began leaving the country because the Kremlin had criminalized independent war reporting, which meant the end of journalism in Russia. People left the country just to gasp the air of sanity and get away from Putin’s cult of death.

The country mostly tolerated its own strangling. Pacifists inside Russia can be arrested for holding up a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in public, or for writing certain posts on social media.

Whether because of fear or inertia, Russian society hardly stirred itself during the massacres in Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka, and Mariupol. I don’t accept repression as an excuse for passivity. The willingness to remain silent is hardly distinguishable from the impulse of the Soviet man who looked at a nonconforming neighbor and picked up the phone to call the KGB. And the silence of the many throws into relief the protests of the few.

Last year, a movement called Soft Power petitioned against the war in Ukraine and the mobilization to support it: “President Vladimir Putin does not and cannot have any legal grounds, any balanced reasons for the war,” the petition said. Nearly half a million people signed it. But in the country at large, anti-war voices have grown faint and the lists of those arrested or killed have grown long. Russia’s rich enjoy opulent lives while the rest of the country stagnates—and sends its children to die in something they are not allowed to call “war.”

[Read: The bitter truth behind Russia’s looting of Ukrainian art]

The war in Ukraine destroyed the part of me that missed Russia and felt pain for its fate. I can at last let go of my peculiar nostalgia—the nostalgia for what I hoped Russia could one day be—and see the country for what it is.

Russia is the country destroying cities and villages in Ukraine; the country where more than 500 political prisoners languish; where even Wagner soldiers know that their nation has no pity for its dead; the global power whose leader has entered an anti-Western entente with North Korea, China, Hamas, and other authoritarian governments that kill journalists and opposition activists. Russia has reached its bottom, and then the level beyond.

Spain and Barcelona midfielder Gavi suffers a serious knee injury in the Euro 2024 qualifying win over Georgia.

Scotland midfielder Scott McTominay criticises Georgia after the sides' 2-2 Euro 2024 qualification draw, calling them "a disgrace".

Preview followed by live coverage of Thursday's European Championship qualifying game between Georgia and Scotland.

Photo-illustrations by Gabriela Pesqueira

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

One of the treasures of Black history is preserved in a plain gray box, stashed away in a quiet room. In Nashville one morning, as the Fisk University campus shimmered in the summer heat, I walked into the archives of the Franklin Library to see it: a collection of papers from just after the Civil War about the founding of the university and others like it. I put on a pair of white cloth gloves to handle the pages. The stories I read in the collection were real, but they also felt to me like cosmology, recounting the beginnings of Black institutions I love and the arduous labors and journeys of the people who made them. The world described in the archive seemed especially malleable: open to possibility, and open to being shaped according to the hopes of the Black people in it.

One story in particular stood out, from the diary of a young woman named Ella Sheppard. In the summer of 1871, she was stuck waiting for a train home, in a hotel somewhere in the middle of Tennessee. She was traveling with a group of students, also Black, back to Nashville after singing at a concert in Memphis. Traveling in the South was dangerous for any Black person, let alone for a coed group of students making their way through the state where the Ku Klux Klan had recently been founded.

According to Sheppard’s diary, the presence of the Black singers did indeed attract attention. A mob of local white men, engaged in what another source euphemistically described as “electioneering,” began to threaten the students. As Sheppard recalled in her diary, the troupe left the hotel with the mob still in tow and walked to the railroad stop, where the choir began to sing a hymn. The mob melted away. As the train approached, Sheppard wrote, only the leader of the mob remained. He “begged us with tears falling to sing the hymn again.”

The group did not yet have renown or even a name, but the encounter at the train stop was an omen. In time, the choir would become the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the diary written by Sheppard, who served as the group’s pianist and composer, preserves its origin story. Beyond that, the diary, and the other documents in that gray box, offer a founding story of the university itself. And they explain how the Negro spiritual went from being “slave music” to one of the most popular genres in America. Considered solely as cultural artifacts, the collection at Fisk—the delicate manuscripts, the brittle newspaper clippings, the photographs, the musical arrangements—is a marvel.

In my hands, I also held crucial insights into the radical possibilities of Reconstruction, a period of American history that has been purposefully warped and misunderstood for generations. In the process of revealing and restoring—and understanding—the actual truth about that era, we might also glimpse a new opportunity for ourselves. We might even again pick up the project of reshaping the world.

In his foundational work, The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois devotes the last essay to “sorrow songs,” or Negro spirituals. He describes spirituals as radical folk music, their very existence a rebuttal to the notion that Black people were too primitive to hold political rights. Du Bois was himself a proud alumnus of Fisk University, and no stranger to the archive. In the essay, he provided a capsule history of “the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.” It began shortly after the train-stop incident.

The year 1871 was a crucible. Six years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the true terms of peace were still being negotiated—especially insofar as freedpeople were concerned. By 1871, Republicans in Congress had managed to have the states ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The 11 rebel states had been readmitted to the Union. Buoyed by the votes of Black men, five Black representatives held congressional seats. Congress had created a Department of Justice and given it a mandate to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Fisk and dozens of other institutions, many of them supported by the Freedmen’s Bureau, had sprung up to educate Black students of all ages. They formed the nucleus of what we know today as historically Black colleges and universities. (My father recently served as the president of Fisk.)

But the revolution was faltering. Many northern white Republicans had grown weary of the constant federal oversight required to protect the rights of Black people in the former Confederate states. Their attention, and the nation’s, had turned west, to the country’s expansion and the bloody dispossession of the Indigenous people who lived there. The Freedmen’s Bureau would come to a formal end in 1872, but its efforts were already effectively exhausted. Meanwhile, former Confederates tallied rolling successes in their “redemption” of southern governments—restoring themselves to power through violence and fraud.

It was in this environment that Fisk University’s choir—10 students, ranging in age from 14 to their early 20s—took to the road. Several singers had been born into slavery; one, Benjamin Holmes, had read the Emancipation Proclamation aloud to those imprisoned with him in a slave pen in 1863.

They’d undertaken their journey in order to save their fledgling school. Fisk University had been founded in 1866 with the support of the American Missionary Association, an abolitionist organization that turned its energies to educating freedpeople after the war. But, with the primary objective of abolition met, donations dwindled. Fisk was one of several normal schools and universities that the AMA was now struggling to support. Campus conditions were miserable. Sheppard recalled in her diary that, in cold weather, students shivered through the night in substandard housing, with barely any protection from the elements. They subsisted on food that was nearly inedible. The situation at Fisk was a microcosm of Black life in the South: unprecedented promise and potential oblivion living under the same crumbling roof.

George L. White, a white former Freedmen’s Bureau official and Fisk’s treasurer, was aware of the dire circumstances. The future of the institution was in peril—as was the entire project of educating freedpeople in the South. But White had an idea: He believed that the small choir he’d founded could help save Fisk. He and Sheppard had constantly drilled the singers, taking time to practice whenever the group’s studies allowed. The concert in Memphis had showcased their talent, and perhaps the performance at the train stop had ordained their purpose.

White proposed a tour through the North, hoping to raise a sum of $20,000—about $500,000 today. Most of the prospective audiences for these benefit concerts would be white: The director hoped to astonish them with the choir’s polish, and to rekindle the abolitionist fervor that had financially supported Fisk in its infancy.

Fisk’s faculty, and the parents of its students, thought White’s scheme was ridiculous. They called it a “wild-goose chase” and pointed to the real dangers that a group of young Black students would face on the road. The AMA actively discouraged the tour, worried that a poor showing might, in fact, impede fundraising efforts. In an act of disobedience, White drew funds from the school’s meager treasury, and the singers set out for Ohio.

The word reconstruction first brings to mind the idea of reconstituting what was, exactly as it was. Buildings may be reconstructed after disasters to the same specifications as before, defying the calamities that felled them. Ultimately the South was reconstructed in this way, with racial domination and labor exploitation as its foundation.

But reconstruction can mean something else, too. The word can connote taking the old and making it new, taking rupture and rubble as opportunities to fix fundamental faults, or to create new edifices altogether. For the span of just over a decade, America tried this definition on in starts and stops, attempting to fashion a truly new nation from the wreckage of the Civil War. The Fisk University singers were part of that effort, attesting to the truth that Reconstruction was not and never could be ended by the hand of the federal government.

As Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, and as Sheppard recounted in her diary, the early going for the singers was miserable, and dangerous. Lynchings and wholesale pogroms of Black communities were so common as to be unremarkable in the South, and threats of violence did not stop once Black people arrived in the North. According to the Fisk history, the students also faced the ire of white people who “spelled negro with two g’s.” White crowds often ridiculed the singers, and the group was regularly denied accommodation in white establishments. As the Fisk history has it, “The world was as unfamiliar to these untraveled freed people as were the countries through which the Argonauts had to pass; the social prejudices that confronted them were as terrible to meet as fire-breathing bulls or the warriors that sprang from the land sown with dragons’ teeth.”

The singers tried to take things in stride. It was never lost on them that every tour stop was history made. When Sheppard was an infant, her own mother had been bound to the land, and was sold away from her like nothing more than livestock. The fact that, at 20, Sheppard could freely take a train to the North was at once ordinary and revolutionary.

For their early performances—in Nashville, Memphis, and Cincinnati—the singers mostly pulled from a repertoire of standard popular songs designed to showcase their equality with white choirs and to impress any sophisticates in the audience. This was no small thing. The belief in the intellectual, moral, cultural, and evolutionary inferiority of freedpeople was pervasive among even white liberals in 1871. Just three years earlier, the editors of the Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Magazine had argued against the proposition that “the negro, in his native state, knows what music is,” and ascribed any facility in music among Black people to clever mimicry or traces of white ancestry. According to Andrew Ward, the author of Dark Midnight When I Rise, a history of the Fisk University singers, the main interaction that most white northerners had with what they believed to be Black culture was the buffoonery of minstrelsy, mostly performed by white entertainers in blackface.

The choir found itself caught between white apathy and white hostility. At several venues, the singers barely sold enough tickets to cover their costs. In Chillicothe, Ohio, where George White used to teach, they drew enough of a crowd to instill hope of earning some money. But before they performed, they learned that the Great Fire, on October 8, had destroyed much of Chicago. They donated all of their proceeds from that night—less than $50—to victims of the fire.

The autumn stretched on. White prayed for deliverance. He declared that the singers should take the name Jubilee after the year in the biblical cycle whose arrival was celebrated by the manumission of slaves and the absolution of debts.

A new way forward for what was now the Fisk Jubilee Singers presented itself during a concert one night in Oberlin, Ohio. Mostly in private, the singers had been practicing a new repertoire, songs that the majority of white people had never heard. They cobbled together snatches of work songs and “sorrow songs” that many of the students, or their parents, had learned in the fields while enslaved. The minister and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson had written in the pages of this magazine about his experience of the Negro spirituals sung by Black soldiers during his time as a Union officer, calling them “a stimulus to courage and a tie to heaven.” But, for the songs they sang, there were no songbooks to work from. White, Sheppard, and the singers wrote much of the music down for the first time, helping formalize the genre as they went.

[From the June 1867 issue: Negro spirituals]

Sheppard noted in her diary that the singers harbored a deep ambivalence about even practicing spirituals in private. The songs “were associated with slavery and the dark past, and represented the things to be forgotten,” she wrote. Spirituals were imbued with the pain and the shame of bondage, which several of the Fisk singers knew firsthand. The songs were also considered sacred. To some, putting lyrics to paper or accompaniment meant stripping the spirit from the spirituals. Even in front of the small, mostly Black crowds that the choir had entertained before setting out on tour, the spirituals had been mixed in sparsely.

Ella Sheppard, the pianist and composer for the Fisk Jubilee Singers (Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Source: New York Public Library.)

But that night in Oberlin, the Jubilee Singers did something different. As guests of a meeting of the National Council of Congregational Churches, they were given an opportunity to perform. Among the songs that they chose was “Steal Away,” one of the spirituals in their repertoire. The song begins with a plaintive call to “steal away,” which is then echoed by the choir. The song’s quiet opening lyrics eventually swell with force to deliver “the trumpet sounds in my soul.” The Jubilee Singers had announced themselves with thunder. As The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer wrote on November 17, “They sung with such effect that the scrip was as abundant as the applause, a market basket full of money being taken for the University.”

The praise from the choir’s Oberlin performance helped them earn the notice of Henry Ward Beecher, an immensely influential abolitionist and preacher who had once sent rifles to John Brown’s antislavery guerrillas in Kansas. Beecher invited the group to sing for his congregation in Brooklyn.

Traveling to the event, the singers knew that it would likely be their last chance to prove themselves and save the university. They expected Beecher’s congregation to be a friendly crowd. The same church had backed Beecher’s most extreme forays into abolition and had hosted escaped and former slaves before. But the singers also knew that even the expectations of friendly crowds could be misshapen by prejudice.

They chose to begin the Brooklyn concert with a dramatic innovation: singing from the church balcony, obscured from the crowd by a curtain, their spectral voices filling the nave. And they chose to lead with “Steal Away,” the spiritual that had gotten them to Brooklyn in the first place. According to Fisk’s account of the Jubilee Singers, “So soft was their beginning that the vast audience looked around to see whence came this celestial music. Gradually louder and even louder the voices rose—to a glorious crescendo—and then back down to a mere whisper, ‘I ain’t got long to stay here.’ ” As they sang, the curtain was pulled back to reveal their faces. The audience’s reception was rapturous: “They clamored for more—would not let the singers cease.” Donations poured in. Beecher blessed the spirituals, though with an unfortunate image: “Only they can sing them who know how to keep time to a master’s whip.”

Ultimately, the Jubilee Singers became one of the most famous performing acts in the world. They toured through 1872, capturing the attention of both Black and white audiences. Their domestic success launched them abroad. They sang for Queen Victoria and for Kaiser Wilhelm I. In the end, George L. White’s “wild-goose chase” raised not $20,000 but almost $100,000.

The tour saved Fisk University. But more than that, it preserved an art form. Spirituals such as “Steal Away” became the core of the Jubilee Singers’ performances, and this expanding repertoire became the basis for the songbook of standards that still graces Black churches today. The spirituals captured the imagination of post-abolition literati. Mark Twain became something of a Jubilee Singers groupie, attending several shows to experience the music that he called “the perfectest flower of the ages.”

Some white listeners came just for the music; some came for the spectacle; some claimed that the Jubilee Singers’ spirituals had made them more sympathetic to “the plight of the Negro.” But their reactions were secondary to what the new prominence of the form meant for the people who’d made it. After one show in Washington, D.C., the Jubilee Singers were thrilled to have an audience with Frederick Douglass, then the most famous Black man in America. He told the singers: “You are doing more to remove the prejudice against our race than ten thousand platforms could do.” He was so taken by the young people from Fisk that he sang for them “Run to Jesus,” a spiritual that he’d learned as a child. The singers transcribed his song on the spot, adding it to the songbook. In a playbill for a later concert, promoting the new song, the Jubilee singers wrote: “Thus, under the influence of this song, he at last gained his freedom, and the world gained Frederick Douglass.”

The golden age of the Jubilee Singers was brief. Sheppard, the pianist and composer, had endured chronic illness even before the tour. Exhausted by the group’s barnstorming, White and several other members also took ill. As white supremacists in the South steadily destroyed Black civil rights, and as the North lost interest in protecting those rights, traveling as a Black coed group grew too dangerous. In 1877, when Congress officially ended Reconstruction—ratifying the deal that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency and effectively withdrew federal troops from the South—the goings-on at Black universities were no longer considered by most liberal white people to be matters of their concern. With the coming of Jim Crow, institutions such as Fisk would form a network of care for Black folk—places where the true possibilities of Reconstruction could be preserved, even if neglected by the rest of America. The Jubilee Singers have been part of this effort; they still perform at concerts across the country.

But Negro spirituals went on to change the country as a whole. In America’s fragmented antebellum culture, before the advent of true mass media, the closest thing to “national music” had been the traveling farce of minstrel shows. Yet during Reconstruction, both the live performance and sheet music of Negro spirituals exploded in popularity. Spirituals prefigured the rise of the blues—a direct successor—as the first truly national popular music. The Black writer and activist James Weldon Johnson, writing in 1925, called spirituals “America’s only folk music and, up to this time, the finest distinctive contribution she has to offer the world.”

Through the efforts of the freedpeople themselves, the songs that had sustained them in the fields became a national art form. This transformation was not without cost. It wouldn’t be long before Black music was co-opted by white musicians and consumers. The early radio recordings of spirituals were often performed by white singers, and marketed to white audiences. For much of white society, the spiritual was the music of the freedpeople—minus the freedpeople.

For this reason, many radical Black scholars later considered the preservation and proliferation of the spiritual to be the ultimate capitulation—a sacred piece of Black culture saved only by performing it for people who largely thought that Black culture was unworthy.

Maybe there is another conclusion. After all, the spiritual was always meant to be performed in public, in full view of the overseer’s watchful eyes. But beneath the surface, the lyrics and rhythms of spirituals carried messages among the enslaved about kinship, about love, about daily life, about the freedom of the “promised land,” and even about rebellion. Insubordinate messages persisted precisely because, like the editors of Lippincott’s Magazine, the overseers believed that Black culture was counterfeit, and that the people chopping cotton in the fields could not turn words into effective weapons. The insurgency of the spiritual always relied on white consumption. It was the poison in the master’s tea.

Today, the legacy of Reconstruction most often surfaces in its legal consequences. The Fourteenth Amendment, in particular, has been the subject of major recent Supreme Court rulings on voting rights and abortion rights—the concept of equal protection under the law has never ceased being contentious. But the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers shows that the Constitution was not the only aspect of America subject to renegotiation during Reconstruction. The singers had set out to perform popular white music, in the main, but they soon found purpose in remaking American music in their own image. The same was true of every other element of life into which freedpeople entered. Throughout Reconstruction, societal assumptions—about labor relations, gender roles, the makeup of families, the means and ends of education, and much else—were in flux across the country, driven by the efforts of emancipated Black people in the South.

Experiments in new ways of living propagated wherever Black people pressed feet to earth. “Freedmen’s towns” flourished across the South, with all manner of governance. Would-be utopias winked in and out of existence. In coastal South Carolina, freedpeople soon became the majority of farm operators on the Sea Islands. There, they resisted guidance from the Freedmen’s Bureau (and the hopes of their former enslavers), rejecting the local market economy in favor of building spontaneous pastoral communes out of former plantations, and growing crops for subsistence instead of the market.

Across the South, freedpeople reconstituted families pulled apart on the auction block, but did so along much looser kinship lines than the nuclear family unit. In Savannah, Georgia, Black women amassed tracts of land in their own names to pass on to their children. Many freedpeople forsook the surnames of their enslavers, or even the first names they’d been given. Renaming was often an act of both radical purpose and plain descriptiveness: Freeman remains a common last name today.

In music and otherwise, it was clear that the main goal of Reconstruction—as it existed in the hearts and minds of the people being reconstructed—was not to leave the country as it was, but to shake the foundations of possibility. It was in this pliable reality that the Fisk Jubilee Singers began to make their mark.

The potency of spirituals and their insurgent history were clear to Du Bois. He tried to make his case, often writing in publications that endorsed the bigotry—sometimes clothed, sometimes naked—of his white contemporaries. In 1901, as a young scholar still relatively new to the white literary scene, Du Bois wrote for a series on Reconstruction in The Atlantic. Alongside skeptical essays from the historian William A. Dunning (who founded the school of American history that claimed the policy of making Black people citizens was a mistake) and Woodrow Wilson (who argued that freedpeople had not been fit to vote), Du Bois wrote, “The granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race.”

[From the December 2023 issue: What The Atlantic got wrong about Reconstruction]

In his essay, Du Bois helped begin a slow reckoning with history that continues today. He did so not merely through his own insight and intellect, but through the revolutionary act of taking the freedpeople and their ambitions seriously—by describing what they wanted from Reconstruction.

For most of the past century, that history of possibility and Black self-determination during Reconstruction was considered too dangerous to teach. Du Bois’s own work on the topic was ignored by white historians as long as he lived, and textbooks inspired by Dunning littered classrooms in the South (and the North) even during my own childhood. To this day, the most famous and widely seen depiction of ostensible Black life during Reconstruction might be the racist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, the D. W. Griffith epic that portrays Klansmen as heroes saving the South from Black savages and was endorsed by Wilson during his time as president. That fact suggests just how much the real story of Black Reconstruction has been obliterated from the public eye.

A growing movement on the right today again finds the history obscured by Wilson, Dunning, and the rest to be too inconvenient or perilous for schools and libraries. Agitation against depictions of Black history and agency is often grounded in the claim that it unfairly makes white people of the present feel guilty for the sins of the past. But that might just be cover for the real reason. Perhaps the true danger of Black history—especially of the era when the formerly enslaved seized and shaped their freedom—is that it shows us that there are more and better possibilities than the present.

That was the fundamental message of most spirituals, and of the sacred code of the promised land. That message is kept in a box of documents in a campus library. Even when salvation seems beyond reach, it may still be in our own hands.

In late August 2022, I walked into a building full of people in Drew, Mississippi. Folding chairs had been crammed everywhere they could be crammed, from the bathroom hallway to the front doors. We had all gathered there for a belated memorial service for Emmett Till, the boy brutally lynched in that very town by white men in 1955. Local citizens, dignitaries, schoolchildren, journalists—everyone was packed together.

After the processional, after the greetings and prayers, the Valley Singers of Mississippi Valley State University took the floor. They began a rendition of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, in 1900. The first two verses of the song evoke the trials of Blackness in the past and present. The choir sang Johnson’s lyrics with triumph, their voices filling the space.

Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871, the same year the Jubilee Singers set out on their tour. Their story inspired his own work cataloging and interpreting spirituals; he dedicated his first book on spirituals to “those through whose efforts these songs have been collected, preserved, and given to the world.” The history of the Jubilee Singers had been important to him. The lyrics and composition of his own anthem were inflected by the spirituals they rescued.

To Johnson, the revival of the spiritual “marked a change in the attitude of the Negro himself toward his own art material; the turning of his gaze inward upon his own cultural resources.” In his view, those cultural resources were themselves the power to build, and not just imitate—to shape a world. The song we all heard in that hot room in Mississippi was a tribute to a legacy that allowed us to be there in the first place.

Sweat dripped down my face as the singers brought the song home. The final verse slowed down to a quiet, piercing prayer. And then, a final, exulting march: “Shadowed beneath Thy hand / May we forever stand.” Even in that room, blanketed in Mississippi heat, I felt chills.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Years of Jubilee.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Illustrations by Justin Jenkins

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

During the summer of 1997, my wife and I picked up our 9-year-old daughter from a ballet camp in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and drove to the nearby Gettysburg National Military Park, which they had never seen and I barely remembered from a boyhood visit. The park’s presentation of history left much to be desired. The visitor center’s small museum and the numerous monuments scattered across the battlefield conveyed a great deal about how the battle had been fought in July 1863, while offering almost no explanation of why the combatants were fighting. The park commemorated the Union’s greatest military victory, but its emotional centerpiece was the disastrous southern assault known as Pickett’s Charge, identified, in the romantic glow of nostalgia, as the “high-water mark” of the Confederacy. In labels accompanying the display of historic artifacts and images, the words valor and glory were almost always applied to soldiers who fought for the South, not for the Union.

That the place where the Civil War reached its turning point had become a shrine to the courage of those who fought to destroy the nation and preserve slavery should not have been a surprise. It has long been a commonplace that the South lost the Civil War but won the battle over historical memory. For decades, almost from the moment of surrender, the ideology of the Lost Cause shaped both popular and scholarly understanding of the conflict.

As Elizabeth R. Varon observes in Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South, her compelling new biography of James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s second in command, the Lost Cause was far more than a military narrative. It provided a comprehensive account of the war’s origins, conduct, and consequences. The conflict, in this telling, had little to do with slavery, but instead was caused, depending on which book you read, by the protective tariff, arguments over states’ rights, or white southerners’ desire for individual liberty. Confederate soldiers were defeated not by superior generalship or greater fighting spirit but by the Union’s advantages in manpower, resources, and industrial technology. And the nation’s victory was marred by what followed: the era of Reconstruction, portrayed as a time of corruption and misgovernment, when the southern white population was subjected to the humiliation of “Negro domination.” This account of history was easily understandable and, like all ideologies, most convincing to those who benefited from it—proponents of white supremacy.

Just how widely and publicly memorialized the Lost Cause narrative remained more than 150 years later became glaringly clear in the fallout from tragic events such as the Charleston, South Carolina, church massacre in 2015; the deadly altercation in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017; and the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in 2020. The legacy of slavery was propelled to center stage in today’s culture wars. With unexpected rapidity, the Confederate battle flag came down from many public buildings. And dozens of monuments to southern military leaders—most of them erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to help provide historical legitimacy for the Jim Crow system of racial inequality, then being codified into law—were removed from their pedestals.

[From the June 2021 issue: Why Confederate lies live on]

Of course, omission, not simply falsehood, can be a form of lying (as Alessandra Lorini, an Italian historian, noted earlier this year in an excellent survey of debates about historical monuments, titled Le Statue Bugiarde, or, roughly, “Statues That Lie”). For many years, the Civil War was remembered as a family quarrel among white Americans in which their Black countrymen played no significant role—a fiction reflected in the paucity of memorials indicating that enslaved men and women had been active agents in shaping the course of events. Lately, some historical erasures have begun to be remedied. For example, a memorial honoring Robert Smalls, the enslaved Civil War hero who famously sailed a Confederate vessel out of Charleston Harbor and turned it over to the Union navy, and later served five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, is now on display in Charleston’s Waterfront Park.

Back when we visited, the Gettysburg battlefield was beginning to be swept up in changing views of history. The site is strewn with monuments, memorials, markers, and plaques—1,328 of them, according to the National Park Service, approximately a quarter of which memorialize Confederate officers and regiments. (Visitors sometimes ask guides whether all these monuments “got in the way of the battle.”) The Park Service and the Gettysburg Foundation, which jointly administer the site, were raising funds to build a new museum and visitor center. And in 1998, an equestrian statue was installed of James Longstreet, one of the Confederacy’s most successful generals, present at the battle but never before memorialized at Gettysburg. Longstreet had warned Lee in vain that Pickett’s Charge courted disaster. (To Lee’s credit, after the attack, which left about half of the 12,500 Confederate troops dead or wounded, he declared, “All this has been my fault.”)

But the defeat at Gettysburg was not what explained Longstreet’s exclusion from the pantheon of southern heroes. Rather, his conduct during Reconstruction was the problem—an assessment that was endorsed by the branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans that commissioned his statue. The general, the group explained, was being honored for his “war service,” not his “postwar activities.” What were those activities? After the war, Longstreet had emerged as a singular figure: the most prominent white southerner to join the Republican Party and proclaim his support for Black male suffrage and officeholding. Leading the biracial Louisiana militia and the New Orleans Metropolitan Police, he also battled violent believers in white supremacy.

Among the challenges of writing the history of the Reconstruction period is avoiding the language devised by the era’s contemporary opponents as terms of vilification. One such word is scalawag, applied to a white southerner who supported Reconstruction. White-supremacist Democrats viewed scalawags, who could be found in many parts of the South, as traitors to their race and region. The largest number were small farmers in up-country counties where slavery had not been a major presence before the Civil War—places such as the mountainous areas of western North Carolina and northern Alabama and Georgia. There, many white residents had opposed secession and more than a few had enlisted in the Union army. Even though supporting Reconstruction required them to overcome long-standing prejudices and forge a political alliance with Black voters, up-country scalawags saw Black male suffrage as the only way to prevent pro-Confederate plantation owners from regaining political power in the South. All scalawags were excoriated in the white southern press, but none as viciously as Longstreet.

Longstreet’s life (1821–1904) spanned the era of sectional conflict, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Although unique in many ways, his postwar career illuminates both the hopes inspired by the end of slavery and the powerful obstacles to change. To write his biography requires a command of numerous strands of the era’s complex history. Varon, a history professor at the University of Virginia, is the author of a general account of the conflict. She has also written books about the coming of the war and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and is as adept at guiding the reader through the intricacies of Civil War military campaigns as she is at explaining the byzantine factional politics of Reconstruction Louisiana. Her knowledge of the historical context is matched by her balanced appraisal of Longstreet’s attitudes, personal and political.

Longstreet’s unusual postwar political career, Varon insists, did not arise from lack of enthusiasm for slavery or doubts about southern independence. The owner of several slaves, he was a true believer in the Confederate cause. His grandfather was a plantation owner in Edgefield District, South Carolina, widely known as a center of cotton production, proslavery ideology, and secessionism. He was brought up by his uncle Augustus Longstreet, a prominent jurist who made very clear his belief in Black inferiority. Educated at West Point, Longstreet resigned from the U.S. Army in 1861 to join the Confederate war effort. Varon points out that unlike Lee, who on occasion recklessly risked casualties that his army could not afford by attacking Union forces, Longstreet preferred to fight on the defensive. This is why he advised Lee not to send Major General George E. Pickett’s troops to assault the well-fortified Union lines at Gettysburg. But defenders of the Lost Cause—especially those who could never forgive Longstreet’s strong embrace of political rights for former slaves—would blame him retroactively for the defeat at Gettysburg, accusing him of sabotaging Pickett’s Charge by deliberately arriving late on the battlefield with his troops.

[Michel Paradis: The Lost Cause’s long legacy]

Longstreet was at Lee’s side in the tiny village of Appomattox Court House in April 1865 when a note arrived from Ulysses S. Grant demanding the surrender of Lee’s army to avert further bloodshed. Longstreet, who had known Grant since their West Point days, was impressed by the leniency of his old friend’s terms of surrender, which allowed Confederate soldiers to return home on “parole.” They would remain unpunished, and even keep their personal weapons, so long as they did not take up arms against the nation or violate local laws.

In her earlier work on the Appomattox surrender, Varon offered a provocative interpretation of the long-term consequences of Grant’s generosity, making a case that Lee’s officers and many ordinary soldiers saw it as a kind of homage to Confederate bravery. Indeed, a substantial number, she now writes, expected to receive another call to go to war for southern independence. They later argued that the radical expansion of Black rights forced on them during Reconstruction violated the terms of surrender. Those terms, they claimed, did not empower the Union to impose its will on the white South. Thus, resistance to Reconstruction did not violate the promise that paroled soldiers would obey the law.

Longstreet rejected any such interpretation of Lee’s surrender, seeing in it “the flaw of hubris.” He understood that Grant’s terms were an effort to facilitate reconciliation (among white citizens) in the reunited nation and in no way justified political violence. In urging the white South to accept the reality of defeat, Longstreet made the obvious point that the losing party should not expect to impose its perspective on the victor. The white South, Longstreet declared in 1867, had “appealed to the arbitrament of the sword,” and had a moral obligation to accept the outcome: “The decision,” he wrote, “was in favor of the North, so her construction becomes the law.” He believed Confederates should accept that the Union’s victory demonstrated the superiority of a society based on free labor over one based on slavery, and seize the opportunity presented by Reconstruction to modernize the South. Longstreet’s understanding of the lessons and consequences of Confederate defeat, Varon writes, helps explain the mystery of how a man who went to war to destroy the nation and protect slavery decided to join the Republican Party and work closely with Black political leaders during Reconstruction.

Soon after the surrender, Longstreet moved his family to New Orleans, where he established a cotton brokerage and became the president of an insurance company. Then, as now, New Orleans was a city with a distinctive history and an unusually diverse population. Occupied by Union forces early in the war, it harbored a large anti-secession white population. Its well-educated, economically successful free Black community was positioned to take a leading role in the Reconstruction project of revamping southern society, eliminating the vestiges of slavery, and establishing the principle of equal citizenship across racial lines. Many Black men—both those recently liberated and those already free before the war—were elected to public office after Congress, in 1867, ordered the creation of new governments in most of the former Confederate states. New Orleans, and by extension Louisiana, seemed to be a place where Reconstruction could succeed. But the newly created Republican Party was beset by factionalism as various groups jockeyed for political influence. The city was also home to a belligerent population of former Confederates willing to resort to violence to restore their dominion over Black residents.

Very quickly, Longstreet plunged into Louisiana politics, having applied for a pardon from President Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln’s successor. This would enable him to hold public office and retain his property, except for slaves. Johnson refused, but in 1868, as provided in the Fourteenth Amendment, Longstreet received amnesty from the Republican Congress. Lee, who had appealed to Grant personally for immunity from charges of treason but declined to condemn the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, chastised Longstreet for recognizing the legitimacy of Congress’s Reconstruction policy.

But Longstreet, as Varon relates, was adamant that he was anything but a traitor to the white South. The first requirement of reconciliation, he wrote, was to accept frankly that “the political questions of the war” had been settled and should be “buried upon the fields that marked their end.” There was no avoiding Black suffrage and the participation of Black men in southern government. In 1868, Governor Henry Clay Warmoth, a former Union-army officer, created the biracial Metropolitan Police Force, where Longstreet went on to play a leading role. The sight of armed Black men patrolling the streets of New Orleans outraged much of the local white population. Longstreet was also appointed adjutant general of the state militia, which was racially segregated but had Black and white officers.

Over the course of eight years, Longstreet was active on a remarkable number of fronts in Reconstruction New Orleans. Grant appointed him to the lucrative position of customs surveyor. He sat on the New Orleans school board, which began operating the city’s public-education system on a racially integrated basis. Meanwhile, the legislature enacted a pioneering civil-rights law, barring racial discrimination by transport companies and in some public accommodations. Louisiana Republicans split over this measure, with many white leaders—including Governor Warmoth, who vetoed it—opposing it as too radical, while Black officials embraced it. Realizing that Black voters constituted, to use a modern term, the Republican Party’s “base,” Longstreet aligned himself with the state’s activist Black leaders, including P. B. S. Pinchback, who served briefly as the country’s first Black governor after Warmoth was impeached. Uniquely among prominent ex-Confederates, Longstreet frequently spoke out in favor of Black voting rights, further eroding his reputation among white Democrats. Being condemned as a Judas only bolstered his support for Reconstruction.

[From the December 2023 issue: The Black roots of American education]

Violence was endemic in Reconstruction Louisiana, and Longstreet played a major role in trying to suppress it. Terrorist groups such as the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia flourished. In 1874, after a series of disputed elections in Louisiana, the White League launched an armed assault on the state’s Reconstruction government. In charge of defending the city, Longstreet took part in the fighting. But the militia and police were overwhelmed, and only the intervention of federal soldiers restored order. The event exposed a reality that recent scholars such as Gregory Downs have strongly emphasized: The presence of Union troops was essential to Reconstruction’s survival. In 1891, anti-Reconstruction Democrats erected a stone obelisk paying tribute to what they called the Battle of Liberty Place. The accompanying text, added in 1932, celebrated the insurrection as an attempt to restore “white supremacy.” The memorial was removed in 2017, two years after then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu had approved a city-council resolution to do so.

Illustration by Justin Jenkins

By 1875, the persistent violence had convinced Longstreet that Reconstruction should proceed more slowly and try not to “exasperate the Southern people”—by whom he meant white people. Meanwhile, in response to what Varon calls a giant “misinformation campaign” by southern newspapers and Democratic politicians that depicted the South as mired in government corruption, northern support was on the wane, an ominous sign for the future of Reconstruction. Longstreet essentially abandoned participation in Louisiana politics and moved his family to Georgia, where he soon became a leader of that state’s Republican Party.

With Reconstruction ending, southern Republicans searched for ways to stabilize their party and maintain a presence in southern government. In Georgia, Longstreet pursued a strategy different from the course he had embraced in New Orleans. Instead of cultivating alliances with Black leaders, he now worked more closely with white Republicans, many of them scalawags, who urged northern Republicans to help “southernize” the party by boosting the power of its white members and limiting that of Black politicians. The “colored man,” Longstreet wrote to Thomas P. Ochiltree, a politician from Texas, had been “put in the hands of strangers who have not understood him or his characteristics.” By “strangers,” he was alluding to carpetbaggers (another of those tainted terms), northerners who took part in Reconstruction in the South and were derided by Democrats as merely seeking the spoils of office. Varon calls this letter “a blatantly racist piece of paternalist pandering.” Despite Longstreet’s efforts to reduce the political power of Black Republicans, white Democrats accused him of trying to “Africanize the South.” He remained popular, however, with Black Americans after Reconstruction ended, even winning praise from Frederick Douglass for his continued endorsement of Black suffrage and his condemnation of lynching. Longstreet also spent much of his time setting the record straight, as he saw it, regarding his wartime accomplishments. In 1896, he published a 690-page memoir, roundly denounced by adherents of the Lost Cause.

Varon offers a mixed verdict on Longstreet’s career. He could be arrogant and opportunistic, eager to bolster his own reputation. He benefited personally from the numerous positions to which he was appointed (in particular the patronage posts he enjoyed after the end of Reconstruction, including ambassador to the Ottoman empire and federal marshal for northern Georgia). But he also demonstrated remarkable courage, refusing to abandon the Republican Party, as many scalawags eventually did, or to change his mind about Black citizens’ political and civil rights.

Longstreet seems to have thought of himself, Varon writes, as “a herald of reunion.” And yet, she notes, his life exemplified the “elusiveness” of various kinds of postwar reconciliation—between white northerners and white southerners, between white and Black Americans, between upholders of the Lost Cause and advocates of a “New South.” His willingness to work closely with Black Americans, speak out in favor of their rights, and even lead them into battle in the streets of New Orleans overshadowed his military contributions to the Confederacy in the eyes of most white southerners. As a letter to a Georgia newspaper declared, when “it became a question of [the] negro or white man,” Longstreet chose the former and could never be forgiven. No statues of Longstreet graced the southern landscape.

Varon closes with a brief look at memorialization, focusing on the efforts of Longstreet’s second wife in the 1930s and ’40s to raise money to build a statue at Gettysburg. A formidable woman 42 years his junior, Helen Longstreet at age 80 worked as a riveter in a factory building bombers during World War II. The service of Black soldiers inspired her to defend Black voting rights, a stance much praised in the African American press. She died in 1962 at the age of 99. One wonders what she would have thought of the descendants of Confederate veterans who finally installed her husband on horseback at Gettysburg yet felt obliged as late as 1998 to dissociate themselves from his efforts to secure the equal rights of all Americans.

Longstreet believed that peaceful and just reunion would be possible only when the white South moved beyond the myth of the Lost Cause. The end of his erasure from historical memory highlights what a long and complicated evolution that has proved to be. Perhaps his restoration is also a sign that the time has come to shift attention from taking down old monuments to erecting new ones, including some to the Black and white leaders of Reconstruction, who braved white-supremacist violence in an effort to bring into being the “new birth of freedom” that Abraham Lincoln envisioned at Gettysburg.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “A Traitor to the Traitors.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

In all my years doing research at the National Archives, I had never cried. That day in fall 2012, I had simply planned to examine documentary material that might help determine how the yet-to-be-built National Museum of African American History and Culture would explore and present the complicated history of American slavery and freedom.

As I read through the papers of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—the Freedmen’s Bureau, as it’s usually called—I decided to see if I could find records from Wake County, North Carolina, where I knew some of my own enslaved ancestors had lived. I had few expectations because I knew so little about my family’s history. From a surviving wedding certificate for my paternal great-grandparents, I’d gotten the name of my earliest-known family member, an enslaved woman named Candis Bunch, my great-great-grandmother. But scrolling through rolls of microfilmed documents from the Raleigh office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, I realized the chances were remote that I would find my ancestor.

But when I turned my attention to a series of labor contracts—designed to give the newly freed some legal protections as they negotiated working relationships with their former enslavers—I found a single page documenting a contract between Fabius H. Perry, who owned the plantation next to the one where my ancestors had been enslaved, and Candis Bunch. That page not only filled a void in my knowledge of my family’s history, but also enriched my understanding of myself.

I was amazed at what a single piece of paper could reveal. For two days of farm work in 1866, Candis received $1, and for 44 days of work in 1867, she received $11. The contract also revealed that her daughter Dolly was paid $3 for housework. As I read further, the contract delineated what Candis owed Perry for the purchase of cotton and soap.

What reduced me to tears was the fact that, out of her meager earnings, Candis had spent 60 cents on two “baker tins,” more than the payment she received for an entire day’s work. I remembered how my paternal grandmother, Leanna Bunch, who resided in Belleville, New Jersey, and died two weeks before my fifth birthday, used to bake cookies in the shape of hearts and crescent moons to cajole me into napping. Did she use the very same tins that Candis had labored to buy? Had that been the beginning of a family tradition: No matter how difficult times may be, always help the children find some joy?

With this personal discovery came the realization that documents like these from the Freedmen’s Bureau—well over a million pages, created out of bureaucratic necessity—could help African Americans today better understand themselves and their enslaved ancestors. These records, if made more accessible, could help all of us grasp the challenges, the pain, the losses, the courage, and the resiliency of a people who had both powered and endured the transition from slavery to freedom. They could bring the grand narrative of Reconstruction to a more human scale.

The people we encounter in the records of the Freedmen’s Bureau call out to be remembered. Their lives, their sacrifices, are stories to be revealed and lauded. Stories such as these also provoke discomfort—and, in some quarters, resistance. Politicians have been elected by sowing fear about “divisive” history. Is it divisive to point out that African Americans believed in, and struggled toward, an aspirational America, an America that had made promises but had not yet delivered?

The hope that freedom would transform a people and a nation was captured in a cartoon by Thomas Nast that appeared in Harper’s Weekly on January 24, 1863. Nast’s drawing celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln a few weeks earlier. The left side of the image depicts the horrific impact of slavery: slave auctions and the destruction of families; backbreaking labor in the cotton fields; a woman being whipped. On the right, the benefits of freedom: a country at peace, with formerly enslaved children attending school; a Black worker drawing fair wages; Black and white figures showing mutual respect toward each other. The centerpiece is an image of a Black family that has achieved middle-class status, with well-clothed children and elders sitting by the hearth. Nast’s cartoon looked forward to a future where fairness and freedom were the norm. That was the hope of Reconstruction, and the engine of that hope was the Freedmen’s Bureau.

On March 3, 1865, after nearly two years of debate, Congress passed “an Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees.” Lincoln signed it into law the same day. The bureau, embedded in the War Department, was one of the first federal forays into social engineering, in some ways anticipating the more activist government policies of the New Deal and the Great Society. Simply put, its charge was to protect the basic rights and help provide for the basic needs of the 4 million people who had been, until recently, enslaved.

The value and impact of the Freedmen’s Bureau, from its inception until it was defunded, in 1872, cannot be overstated. At its peak, more than 900 bureau agents were located throughout the former Confederacy, in rural hamlets and urban centers. Among other things, these agents documented the violence that was at the core of white southern resistance to Reconstruction. They responded to and recorded the desire of the formerly enslaved to confirm their marital standing. They gave food to the poor and the indigent regardless of race. They helped establish Black educational institutions, from elementary “freedom schools” to colleges such as Shaw University, in North Carolina, and Howard University, in the nation’s capital. More than 40 “freedmen’s hospitals” served the sick, the malnourished, and those whose health had been damaged by the conditions of slavery. During a period when most in the South fought to violently overturn the changes implemented by Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau was one of the few outlets where African Americans could address their needs, obtain legal assistance, and see some evidence that change was at hand. One could argue that the bureau was, in essence, a form of reparations.

[From the March 1901 issue: W. E. B. Du Bois on the Freedmen’s Bureau]

Simply by virtue of doing its work, the Freedmen’s Bureau amassed records of the stories, hopes, and disappointments of a people on the cusp of freedom. These documents reveal the agency of the newly emancipated: Freedom was not given but was seized and created by people who “made a way out of no way.” But the documents underscore how difficult the struggle was. Although they make the efforts of individuals and families visible and concrete, the records also reflect how the promise of Reconstruction was derailed by violence, northern apathy, and the rise of Jim Crow.

The documents unlock the names and experiences of people who are often invisible or silent in the conventional telling of history. A significant portion of the Freedmen’s Bureau papers reflect the importance of family, of reconnecting with kin separated by the vagaries of slavery, of protecting children. With freedom came an unyielding desire to find oneself by finding those who’d been sold away. The Freedmen’s Bureau, people hoped, could aid in restoring the bonds of family. In the documents, a freedwoman named Sina Smith described how her mother had been sold from Virginia to Tennessee “about eighteen years past … by Colonel Marshall.” Smith hoped that her mother, Eliza Williams, whom she was now able to “support … in her old age,” could be found, and noted that she was “a member of the Baptist Church” in Nashville.

Requests for assistance contained poignant details that might help locate a family member. A freedman named Hawkins Wilson wrote from Galveston, Texas, searching for his sisters, whom he had not seen in the 24 years since he’d been “sold at Sheriff’s sale” in Virginia. “One of my sisters, Jane,” he wrote, “belonged to Peter Coleman in Caroline County.” Wilson’s letter expressed a belief that the bureau could reconnect him with his family: “I am in hopes that they are still living … and I have no other one to apply to but you.” Wilson drafted an additional letter to be given to Jane. “Your little brother Hawkins is trying to find out where you are and where his poor old mother is … I shall never forget the bag of buiscuits you made for me the last night I spent with you.” He continued by saying he had led a good life and had “learned to read, and write a little.” He said that he hoped they might see each other, but added that if they did not “meet on earth, we might indeed meet in heaven.” Given that the letter remained in the files of the Freedmen’s Bureau, it is unlikely that Wilson was ever reunited with his family.

Numerous letters and depositions describe the frequent terrorist attacks aimed at controlling, intimidating, and killing the formerly enslaved. Some of the violence was random: Jacob Carpenter, from Gaston, North Carolina, stated to an authority that “he had been hunted [through the] town,” dodging gunfire, and “that his life was not safe at any time.” Tobe Jones, of Wilkes County, Georgia, went to visit his wife. Two men assaulted him; one, he recounted, “caught me by the collar and struck me with his fist. Several blows in the face … [He] then picked up a rock and ran after me, and said he would kill me.” White vigilantes also conducted organized raids, focusing their ire on Black teachers and ministers and those bold enough to vote. In Tennessee, churches were burned. In Arkansas, “the school house for colored children at Phillips Bayou was burned down” and a teacher was “ordered to leave.” Night riders—vigilantes intent on violently enforcing white supremacy—struck at those who worked to bring change to the South: On the night of April 18, 1868, 20 mounted men attacked the home of William Fleming, of Franklin, Tennessee; a few months later, in nearby Brownsville, “a party of freedmen were assaulted on their way home … and four of their members shot.” The Freedmen’s Bureau agent stationed in Tennessee noted that “there is an organization … who style themselves Ku, Klux and they are committing depredations on Colored people, property and outrages on their persons.”

The bureau papers highlight the role of women during Reconstruction. Throughout the documents, one encounters Black women demanding fair labor contracts, insisting on respect and common courtesy, seeking and providing educational opportunities, and fighting on behalf of their families. The paperwork exposes the violence and sexual abuse that were all too common in the lives of Black women. When Harriett Kilgore, of Chickasaw County, Mississippi, worked for her former enslaver, Landon Kilgore, in 1865, she was punished for working too slowly. “I told him I had done nothing for him to whip me. He said he wanted to whip me for some time and that I thought that I was free.” In September 1866, Rhoda Ann Childs, of Henry County, Georgia, was beaten, tortured, “and ravished” by an ex-Confederate soldier, in part because her husband had served in “the God damned Yankee Army.” Amanda Willis was forced out of her mother’s home near Springfield, Tennessee, and taken by a white man who “brought me down into the woods and had forcible connection with me.” Women fought back. In Wilkes County, Georgia, in May 1866, Tempy Hill, a freedwoman, saw a white man strike another Black woman, her sister-in-law Lydia Hill. She left her work in the field and confronted him with the “intention of fighting him and to take up for her color.” She struck the assailant with “a chunk of wood.”

The notion of access—to education and to American history through an African American lens—was central to the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016. I was its founding director. The effort to create the museum ultimately led to a project to make Freedmen’s Bureau records available to the broader public.

To begin the process of creating the museum, it was essential to understand the knowledge base of future visitors. For two years, starting in 2005, the museum conducted surveys throughout the country; reviewed an array of specialized reports on America’s understanding of its past; and organized on-the-street interviews that focused on young, diverse participants.

The data revealed that respondents had strong and conflicting views about the role, impact, and continuing resonance of slavery in American life. Almost everyone believed that slavery was an important story. Many felt that the museum should focus on how slavery shaped the African American experience and the way that slavery, “America’s original sin,” was an essential element in the founding and evolution of the United States. An equal number felt that, although it was once important, slavery had little meaning and relevance for contemporary audiences. I remember vividly the day when a Black woman, returning from church, greeted me as we passed on the street. She thanked all those involved in building the museum. But as she hugged me, she whispered, “Whatever you do, don’t talk about slavery.” To her and others, the museum had a chance “to help folks get beyond slavery”—to no longer be constrained by a past that some felt was embarrassing.

What this divide made clear to the museum staff was the need to centralize slavery and freedom as forces that helped define and continue to influence American politics, culture, and economics. But that would not be enough. The museum needed to humanize slavery, so that visitors would recognize the strength and resiliency of the enslaved.

Besides slavery, members of the public were most interested in understanding their own family history. Today, programs like Finding Your Roots, on PBS, and commercial services like Ancestry .com have made personal history accessible and engaging. But in 2005, the way forward was less clear. In due course, the museum would establish the Robert Frederick Smith Explore Your Family History Center. As we considered the center’s role, the staff realized that the biggest contribution would be to help illuminate the lives and histories of the enslaved. The obstacles to families trying to recover the stories of enslaved ancestors were immense. For one thing, African Americans were not enumerated by name prior to the 1870 census.

The best way to get beyond this barrier lay in the Freedmen’s Bureau documents. Generations of scholars, including Ira Berlin, Thavolia Glymph, and Eric Foner, had researched the wealth of information that these papers contained and published scholarly monographs for academic audiences. But access to this trove was too important to be left in the hands of professional historians, or made possible only for those who could travel to the National Archives, in Washington, D.C., which owns and houses the original records.

This understanding led to the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau Project, whose aim was to create a digital portal that would make the bureau documents searchable by name and subject. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of personal histories would be available not only to scholars but also to families in search of their ancestors and, by extension, in search of themselves: helping people find not embarrassment but strength and inspiration in their enslaved ancestors.

That portal could not have been built without an effective collaboration involving the museum, the National Archives, and a pioneering genealogical resource, FamilySearch—an organization dedicated to helping all people discover their family history. One major challenge was the need to review and transcribe upwards of a million pages of documents. Transcription was essential, because the records—written in 19th-century cursive by many different hands—are difficult for contemporary audiences to read. For this portal to have the desired reach, the documents needed to be transcribed by hundreds if not thousands of individuals—an army of trained volunteers whose energy had the additional benefit of helping generate support and enthusiasm for the museum itself in the years before its opening.

Much of the success of this ongoing transcription effort can be credited to FamilySearch and the community that it nurtured. Steeped in the traditions of the Mormon Church, FamilySearch had developed technology and processes that proved essential. Quality control was built in. Following its lead, Freedmen’s Bureau transcriptions are subject to a two-step review—first by a volunteer, then by a member of the Smithsonian staff. If additional edits are required at the final stage of review, the process begins again. Today, people accessing the Freedmen’s Bureau Digital Collection can see the original document as well as the transcription.

One can tell a great deal about a country by what it chooses to remember: by what graces the walls of its museums, by what monuments are venerated, and by what parts of its history are embraced. One can tell even more by what a nation chooses to forget: what memories are erased and what aspects of its past are feared. This unwillingness to understand, accept, and embrace an accurate history, shaped by scholarship, reflects an unease with ambiguity and nuance—and with truth. One frequent casualty of such discomfort is any real appreciation of the importance of African American history and culture for all Americans.

Why should anyone fear a history that asks a country to live up to its highest ideals—to “make good to us the promises in your Constitution,” as Frederick Douglass put it? But too often, we are indeed fearful. State legislatures have passed laws restricting the teaching of critical race theory, preventing educators from discussing a history that “might make our children feel guilty” about the actions and attitudes of their ancestors. Librarians around the nation feel the chilling effects of book bans. Some individuals who seek to occupy the highest office in the land fear the effects of an Advanced Placement class that explores African American history—a history that, as education officials in Florida have maintained, “lacks educational value”; a history that does not deserve to be remembered.

There is no reason to fear a history that, while illuminating the dark corners of America’s past, also displays values and expectations that are central to America’s identity: resiliency, family, education, fairness. The voices within the Freedmen’s Bureau papers demonstrate how the African American fight for access to education, economic opportunity, and basic human rights created paths that benefited all Americans.

Rather than running from this history, we should find in it sustenance, understanding, and hope. In the end, we can’t escape the past anyway. What Joe Louis said of an opponent applies to the legacy of history: You can run, but you can’t hide.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Archive of Emancipation.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.