Connecticut
Reconstruction Vignette
| Although born and raised in Connecticut, yes, and lived in Connecticut more than three-fourths of my life, it has been my privilege to vote at five Presidential elections. Twice it was my privilege and pleasure to help elect the lamented and murdered Lincoln, and if my life is spared I intend to be where I can show that I have the principles of a man, and act like a man, and vote like a man, but not in my native State; I cannot do it there, I must remove to the old Bay State for the right to be a man. Connecticut, I love thy name, but not thy restrictions. I think the time is not far distant when the colored man will have his rights in Connecticut. |
James Mars (1790-1880)
Source: Connecticut Historical Society
James Mars was born into slavery in Connecticut at the end of the 18th century and worked to buy his way to freedom. His 1864 autobiography, Life of James Mars, A Slave Bought and Sold in Connecticut, recounted the story of his enslavement and enfranchisement. Mars updated the text in 1868, concluding with this paragraph on continued limitations to voting rights in his home state. Connecticut ratified the 15th Amendment the following year.
Source: Documenting the American South
Connecticut
Standards Overview
Coverage of Reconstruction: Partial
ZEP Standards Rubric Score: 1 out of 10
The coverage of Reconstruction in Connecticut’s standards is partial, and their content is dreadful. The Connecticut Common Core Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects cover grades 6–8 and 9–12. The standards are skill-based and focused primarily on reading and analyzing primary and secondary sources. They do not detail content-specific information that students should learn and thus do not mention Reconstruction.
The Connecticut Social Studies Framework (CSSF) was created by a committee of Connecticut social studies educators in February 2015. Since Connecticut is a local-control state, the framework was created to “assist curriculum writers at the district level as they write or revise the social studies curriculum for their districts.” Though it is explicitly not a state curriculum, the framework writers indicated they hoped the framework could be a model for curriculum writers at the district level.
Grade 8
The CSSF first includes Reconstruction in a course that spans the colonial era to Reconstruction. Students are expected to evaluate change and continuity in the Black experience during Reconstruction and “analyze reasons that the Reconstruction era could be seen as a success and reasons that the Reconstruction era could be seen as a failure.”
High School
The CSSF high school U.S. history course covers the time period in which Reconstruction took place but does not mention Reconstruction itself. Even though the Connecticut framework proposes a theme of “Freedom, Equality, and Social Justice” for this course, it fails to mention Reconstruction under the proposed content areas. It does list contemporaneous content areas such as Westward Expansion, Industrialization and the Rise of Organized Labor, and Progressivism.
One section of the framework asks students to engage with the “positive and negative” impacts of constitutional amendments since the 1870s, thereby omitting the Reconstruction Amendments passed the decade prior.
Some districts offer alternative U.S. history courses that cover the Reconstruction era in more depth. In the West Hartford district, for example, the regular U.S. history course begins in 1880 and presumably does not cover Reconstruction. The “United States History & the African American Experience” course, however, which can be taken in place of the regular course, begins in 1870 and explicitly mentions Reconstruction as a topic of study.
Educator Experiences
According to responses to our survey, many Connecticut teachers go beyond the standards to include Reconstruction in their lesson plans when they are able. In some cases, teachers were able to take advantage of local control of curricula and innovative outside lesson plans to prioritize Reconstruction.
High school teacher Michael Staffaroni explained that since his school’s history department controlled the curriculum, it was possible to set aside sufficient time for Reconstruction. Staffaroni was able to make use of the Zinn Education Project’s Reconstruction Mixer as “the focal point of my Reconstruction Unit.” Another high school teacher used Zinn’s Reconstructing the South role play and found that students “were able to clearly draw the line between the struggles faced during the Reconstruction era and the racial struggles still being faced today.” This critical connection is one that the state standards do not mention or encourage.
Teachers interested in extending their students’ understanding of Reconstruction have made use of a variety of outside resources. One high school teacher used “objects from the collection of the African American History Museum” to give students an understanding of how Black people’s everyday lives changed after emancipation.
Assessment
Connecticut has no statewide standards that mandate coverage of Reconstruction. The nonbinding CSSF provides only minimal coverage of Reconstruction during middle school and omits it entirely in high school. The Common Core standards do not provide content-specific information and so, naturally, do not mention Reconstruction.
The portions of the CSSF guidelines that do mention Reconstruction in grade 8 are vague and passively framed. For instance, CSSF writers describe the transition from slavery to freedom in passive voice, as one question asks “Was reconstruction effective at helping slaves transition into freedom?” This language obscures both Black people’s agency in the struggle for freedom and autonomy, and white people’s backlash and violent repression of those freedoms. The CSSF includes one mention of the Reconstruction Amendments but places a much greater emphasis on the Civil War.
Some elements of the high school guidelines, such as a suggested unit on constitutional amendments since the 1870s, seem designed to avoid any discussion of Reconstruction. This section specifically leaves out the Reconstruction Amendments by beginning in the 1870s and buries the subject by avoiding asking for whom the amendments had positive and negative impacts.
While teachers make use of outside resources to educate their students on Reconstruction, the lack of effective statewide standards or guidelines renders this a scattershot approach to teaching Reconstruction. If Connecticut students learn about Reconstruction, it is due to the initiative of individual districts, schools, and teachers.
Without guidance around key Reconstruction-era history, many students will not learn about the intensification of white supremacy, the Black Codes, the KKK, debates over who would control land and labor, and Black agency and political organizing. Teaching Reconstruction effectively requires centering Black people’s struggles to redefine freedom and equality and gain control of their own land and labor during and after the Civil War. Any discussion of Reconstruction must also grapple with the role of white supremacist terrorism in the defeat of Reconstruction and the negative and positive legacies of the era that persist to this day.
In December 2020, Gov. Ned Lamont signed into law PA1912, requiring regional and local boards of education to “include an elective course of studies at the high school level that provides students with a better understanding of the African-American, Black, Puerto Rican, and Latino contributions to United States history, society, economy, and culture.”
In 2023, Republican lawmakers proposed a bill that aimed to ban schools from teaching anything that included “biased political ideology” or any curriculum that might bring up feelings of “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” This bill failed to pass, but its introduction is still troubling. Several respondents to our survey expressed concern about the possible chilling effects on classroom education that such bills can have, particularly on discussions of the history and legacies of Reconstruction.