Nine Black Men
6/25/202634 min
Alabama State University is one of America's earliest historically Black colleges. Historian Kellie Carter Jackson shares the institution’s hidden origins. Founded during Reconstruction by nine formerly enslaved men, the story reveals a fierce struggle over education — a battle that unfolded at the very moment Black Americans were gaining political power for the first time.
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First 90 secondsMalcolm Gladwell· Host0:02
[instrumental music] We are now in Washington, D.C., February 25, 1870. A special dispatch goes out from the jam-packed galleries of Congress. "Mr. Revels, the colored senator from Mississippi, was sworn in and admitted to his seat this afternoon at four forty o'clock." As Revels approached the speaker's desk to take his oath, the galleries rose to their feet, quote, "That they might miss no word or lose no glimpse of what was being enacted below." This dispatch, published in The New York Times, described the confirmation of the country's first ever Black person to serve in Congress, Hiram Revels. The United States is still in the aftershocks of the Civil War, but changing quickly. It's been five years since the Confederacy surrendered. The Union's top general, Ulysses Grant, is now the president, and he's a very different man from his predecessor, the Southerner Andrew Johnson. Grant supports the Radical Reconstruction agenda. That includes full citizenship for all people born in the United States and full enfranchisement for men. Congress has just passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting states from denying any man the right to vote, quote, "On account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Nearly two thousand Black people stepped into public