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$15 General Admission, $12 Member, $10 child age 14 or younger

Doors Open for admissions 30 min. prior to screening SOLD OUT

In 2019, Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented a vital new documentary series on Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. The series explores the transformative years following the American Civil War, when the nation struggled to rebuild itself in the face of profound loss, massive destruction, and revolutionary social change. The twelve years that composed the post-war Reconstruction era (1865-77) witnessed a seismic shift in the meaning and makeup of our democracy, with millions of former slaves and free black people seeking out their rightful place as equal citizens under the law.

Mr. Gates will show a 20-minute segment from the documentary and then be joined in discussion by author and historian Eric Foner. 

Eric Foner is the author of the forthcoming The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, which offers a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation’s foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time. Foner’s compact, insightful history traces the arc of three pivotal constitutional amendments from their dramatic origins in pre–Civil War mass meetings of African-American “colored citizens” and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late nineteenth century.

 

“Gates’s series is a great service” New York Times

“A rich four hours, including the birth and purpose of the Ku Klux Klan, the way in which black Americans responded, and without anything resembling a dull moment.” – Wall Street Journal

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-two books and created eighteen documentary films, including Finding Your Roots. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program-Long Form, as well as a Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award.