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 Reconstruction Destructed features Minnesota Federal District Court Judge Jerry Blackwell, Bryan Stevenson, Esq., Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Dr. Josie R. Johnson, University of Minnesota Regent and First Lady of Minnesota Civil Rights and Dr. Duchess Harris, Special Assistant to the Provost and American Studies Professor at Macalester College. Filming of Reconstruction Destructed occurred at The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, one of America’s premiere museums examining America’s history of racial injustice, the Clayton, Jackson, McGhie Memorial and Gravesite in Duluth, MN, and at OMG Studios in Saint Paul, MN
