NARRATOR
In July 1913, more than fifty thousand Civil War veterans gathered on the battlefield at Gettysburg. Gray-bearded soldiers, North and South, joined to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the battle.

AYERS
Veterans felt a kind of bond that came from being soldiers in the war, regardless of which side they had been on. They're celebrating their youth. They're celebrating their glory, [their] bravery. They're celebrating the fact that the American nation had come back together.

NARRATOR
The poetry of the moment was irresistible; bitter enemies reconciled, a nation made whole once more. No one there seemed to notice that there were no black veterans in the crowd.

WALKER
That reunion comes at the cost of black liberty and black freedom. It also comes through a very clever process of rewriting history.

NARRATOR
The Southern legend of the Lost Cause had prevailed.

FONER
By the turn of the century, an image of Reconstruction has been fixed in the American consciousness, both North and South, as a terrible mistake, a travesty of democracy. According to this image, African Americans were given these rights they were unprepared for. Therefore there was this period of terrible mis-government.

BLIGHT
Great changes take time, and this is a great experiment in biracial democracy. But, one of the tragedies of Reconstruction is that it only lasted such a short period of time.

NARRATOR
By 1913, many of the rights won by African Americans during Reconstruction had been taken away. Segregation was the norm and lynching epidemic. But some of what they had built amid the turmoil of Reconstruction had survived -- communities, schools, and churches.

AYERS
Over the next several generations, black Americans never let up in their desire to be full American citizens.

WALKER
The idea of being a black Congressman did not die. The idea of being a black justice of the peace, or superintendent of the schools, did not die.

AYERS
That ideal of America where there was equality, of a South where there was opportunity, never died. And all across the twentieth century, and emerging in this great Civil Rights Movement, we see the legacy of Reconstruction. Took generations to play out, but it never died.