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, at the Clayton, Jackson, McGhie Memorial and Gravesite in Duluth, MN and at OMG Studios in Saint Paul, MN.

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.