The Official Community Premiere Screening will be held at The Capri Theater on June 25, 2025
As part of Minnesota Humanities Center’s 2025 Juneteenth Commemoration series, Reconstruction Destructed is a collaborative film production between OMG Studios and the Minnesota Humanities Center. This documentary commemorates Juneteenth and is part of an annual series of dynamic visual stories The film takes viewers on a present-day journey through the Reconstruction era and the civil rights movement.
Reconstruction Destructed is the sixth film of The Juneteenth Reckoning with Slavery series, that challenge our understanding of slavery, its impact on Minnesota, and how we reconcile our past.
During the Transatlantic Slave Trade, an estimated 10.7 million African men, women and children were kidnapped and sold into captivity in North America, South America and Central America. An estimated two million more people died during the brutal voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.
“Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876,” (a report by Equal Justice Initiative, published in 2020) unpacks the collective ignorance, falsehoods and rhetoric in understanding what happened immediately following the Civil War. The Reconstruction era began during the Civil War and lasted until the dawn of Jim Crow racial segregation in the 1890s. It remains one of the most complicated and poorly understood periods in American History.
During Reconstruction, four million African Americans, newly freed from bondage, sought to integrate themselves into free society – into the educational, economic, and political life of the country.
The failure of the federal government to implement the promise of Reconstruction within the former states of the Confederacy left African Americans without means to fully realize the promise of their new freedom and ultimately allowed for their continued subjugation within the rigid caste system of the South.
Impact of Reconstruction on Minnesotans, Past and Present by Kevin Lindsey, CEO MN Humanities
Failure of Reconstruction to put African Americans on equal footing with all of America’s citizens was not limited to the South. Despite the passage of legislation within the Legislatures of states in the North such as Minnesota, African Americans continued to find themselves at the bottom of the caste. The struggles, challenges, and perseverance of African Americans in Minnesota such as Fred McGhee, a founding member of the Niagara Movement – the forerunner of the today’s NAACP, provides interesting insight into how African Americans can finally break America’s caste system.
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