Hear from Dr. Bill Green about the Reconstruction era in Minnesota.

In an 1876 speech, Frederick Douglass noted that white people were “the children of Lincoln,” while black people were “at best his stepchildren.” When emancipation became the law of the land, white Minnesotans—who had previously championed African Americans in Minnesota and helped secure black rights—began to abandon the fight for racial equality during Reconstruction.

Green is a history professor at Augsburg University and author of The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota, 1860–1876.

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