Nevada
Reconstruction Vignette
| I say it is within the power of the Nevada Legislature to enact such a law without acting in hostility to the Fifteenth Amendment, and I suppose I violate no confidence now in stating that the original draft of that amendment, as reported by Governor Boutwell, of Massachusetts, to the Reconstruction Committee of the Fortieth Congress, contained the words “nativity and religious belief.” I chanced to be present in Washington, although not then a member of this House, and represented to Mr. Boutwell that with the words “nativity and religious belief” in we could not exclude the Chinese from the ballot if we should so desire, and Nevada would not in my opinion ratify the Fifteenth Amendment if it should be so framed as to prohibit the exclusion of the Chinese from the right of suffrage. The language of the Fifteenth Amendment was subsequently modified and the words “nativity and religious belief” were stricken out. |
On March 1, 1869, Nevada became the first state to ratify the 15th Amendment. State lawmakers agreed to extend suffrage to Nevada’s very small African American population, but opposed voting rights for the state’s much larger Chinese American population. On June 9, 1870, The Gold Hill Daily News published recent remarks from Representative Thomas Fitch, excerpted here. Fitch recounted that Congress removed “nativity and religious belief” from the Fifteenth Amendment before Nevada ratified it, thereby allowing local officials to prohibit Chinese American suffrage.
Source: Newspapers.com
Nevada
Standards Overview
Coverage of Reconstruction: Nonexistent
ZEP Standards Rubric Score: 0 out of 10
The coverage of Reconstruction in Nevada’s standards is effectively nonexistent. The Nevada Department of Education adopted the current state social studies standards in 2018.
Students are supposed to learn about Reconstruction during grades 6–8. Nevada is a local-control state and, not surprisingly, the state standards are broad. The one standard that mentions Reconstruction takes a notably narrow focus. It states that students should “evaluate how economic policies impacted individuals, businesses, and society, including but not limited to: Louisiana Purchase, the slave trade, plantation economy, and Reconstruction.”
Because Nevada’s standards provide so little information about whether and how districts and schools should teach Reconstruction, we chose to investigate curricula at the district level. The Local Snapshot below is not meant as a judgment of these districts’ approach to Reconstruction. They were chosen largely at random and are not factored into the grade the state standards receive. The brief analysis of district-level curricula that follows is intended to simply provide a snapshot into how state standards, or lack thereof, can shape Reconstruction pedagogy in the classroom.
Local Snapshot
Washoe County School District (Reno)
The Washoe County School District covers Reconstruction in the final unit of its grade 7 U.S. history course. The unit is extensive and detailed, covering among other topics: “African American leaders,” “voting restrictions,” the Freedmen’s Bureau, Black Codes, the Reconstruction Amendments, sharecropping, and the “Civil Rights Act of 1865” (sic). The curriculum includes a variety of outside resources for further discussion of the topic, including DBQs and Stanford History Education Group lessons. Reconstruction is not covered in either the grade 8 or grade 11 U.S. history courses.
The Carson City School District covers Reconstruction in the final unit of its grade 8 course. The available course summary contains two relevant learning objectives:
I can summarize the successes and failures of Reconstruction by analyzing the impact and perspectives of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
I can identify the Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws and explain how they reflected attitudes about race by examining primary and secondary sources.
Educator Experiences
Nevada teachers who responded to our survey expressed concern that students do not gain insight into the ways Reconstruction and other important histories affect the present day. Middle school teacher Dan Hergenrader wrote that “people tend to think that the Civil War and Lincoln’s actions ended all the racial problems, at least for 100 years,” but “the legacy of hundreds of years ago bleeds into today.” Carrie Nicole Howren, a middle and high school project facilitator, reported that her district does a better job than most, but leaves Reconstruction out of history education in higher grade levels. She added that some parents and politicians stand in the way of correcting this discrepancy and argue that teaching truthful history is synonymous with “indoctrinating students to some political agenda.”
West Wendover High School teacher Kathy Durham noted that she often starts the school year with students who had not learned about Reconstruction in earlier grades. She told us, “By the time I get students as juniors they are basically a blank slate when it comes to American History. I’m beginning to think that is by design.” She added, “I tell my students we’re going to learn the full history of our country. We wouldn’t do a puzzle with just the pieces of a puzzle that appealed to us because we wouldn’t get the full picture, so we’re going to study all the stories from a multitude of perspectives — so we can find the truth about who we are, and who we want to be.”
Durham added that she has developed her own resources to teach about Reconstruction. “I have students analyze the different Reconstruction plans from Lincoln, Radical Republicans, Johnson, and Military Reconstruction and have students suggest their own. We discuss sharecropping and Jim Crow laws and the eventual erecting of Confederate monuments. My students are always quite taken aback when they realize the 13th Amendment actually enabled slavery with it's ‘except in the case of’ clause and how that was exploited by for-profit prison systems and the creation of the ‘chain gang.’ We talk about how African Americans were sent to work in the mines and it was more or less a death sentence. We also talk about the legacy of how Black Codes denied African Americans their 2nd Amendment right. My students debate the legacy that Black Codes and the slavery clause in the 13th amendment. If one could so easily be arrested for something as simple as walking by the railroad tracks, being in town after dark, and then ‘farmed out by the prison system,’ how might that create the culture of, ‘see the law. Run!’”
Assessment
Nevada’s standards on Reconstruction are effectively nonexistent. The sole mention of Reconstruction in the state standards frames the issue around “economic policies,” a narrow and inadequate approach to such a complex topic. The lack of statewide guidance likely contributes to wide variation in coverage of Reconstruction at the district-level.
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.