Emancipation Day is a special holiday in Washington, DC. Observed annually on April 16, the day is meant to commemorate President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the 1862 bill that legally ended slavery in the nation’s capital. But what did slavery’s abolition mean and how did emancipation in DC connect to the significant transformations taking place in the region during the period? Created by award-winning scholar-storyteller Kate Masur, along with illustrator Liz Clarke, Freedom Was in Sight! A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region answers these questions and more.

Kate Masur is a professor of history at Northwestern University with a courtesy appointment in African American studies. Her work focuses primarily on the pre-1900 history of race, politics, and law in the United States. Most recently, she authored Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2021), a history of how African American activists and white allies waged a struggle for racial equality in the free states and how that struggle shaped federal policy during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021.

Masur’s first book was a crucial precursor to her work on Freedom Was in Sight! Published in 2010, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. is a close-up study of politics and activism in in the nation’s capital during Reconstruction. Now, Freedom Was in Sight! expands our understanding of that history through a masterful collaboration with illustrator Liz Clarke. The graphic history harmoniously blends Masur’s research and storytelling prowess with Clarke’s captivating visuals. This appealing, accessible book is ideal reading both in classrooms and living rooms.

I sat down with Masur shortly after the release of Freedom Was in Sight! and our conversation was as kaleidoscopic as the book. We talked about the creation of Black institutions, the centrality of Black women’s labor and leadership, white reactions to Black freedom, and how she and Clarke approached this history with intention and care, particularly when it came to truthfully and humanely representing the violent aspects of the period. Luckily, the book was released in advance of DC Emancipation Day 2025 and gives us much to celebrate and consider for that local holiday season.

Jessica Rucker (JR): I’ve recently been reading a lot about the ideas and activities of Black freedom and liberation seekers in the United States, and I’m grateful I added Freedom Was in Sight! to my list. In a section of the book where you provide an overview of the history of Reconstruction, you explain that Freedom Was in Sight! is not a “word-dominated, monochromatic history text.” I have been thinking about that. What do you mean by that?

Kate Masur (KM): In that section I was explaining why so many people supported the creation of a graphic history of Reconstruction. The book was commissioned by the National Park Service (NPS). An NPS historian named Dean Herrin came up with the idea; inspired by other graphic histories including John Lewis’s March series, Dean thought a graphic history of Reconstruction in the DC region would help illuminate an essential period in American history that too few people understand or think about—one that has important present-day resonances. He thought the graphic-history format had the potential to reach audiences and readers who might not want to read a more traditional history book. Dean applied for and was awarded an internal NPS grant to support the project. Then, in collaboration with the Organization of American Historians, he approached me about authoring the book. He thought I might be interested because he knew my first book, An Example for All the Land, and we had met a few times through NPS projects.

The next step, and what really makes this book so special, is that we were able to bring on board Liz Clarke, a wonderful, experienced artist who created the book’s gorgeous illustrations. Liz’s pictures are the opposite of monochromatic! They look completely different from black-and-white photos or sepia-toned artifacts from the past. The vibrant colors make the stories in the book feel very present and alive, creating a sense of energy that propels them forward. A graphic history is a really multidimensional text that engages readers on many levels. If you’re a very visual person, you can soak in individual frames, one by one, or consider the story that’s told through the illustrations alone. If you’re more oriented toward text, you might move quickly across the pictures, following the narrative via the words. Or you can do some of each. I think having those options—and getting to interact with rich, colorful images representing a period in the distant past—are two things that make a graphic history distinctive and fun.

JR: When does Freedom Was in Sight! begin the story of Reconstruction, and what impact do you think that beginning might have on our understanding of slavery, abolition, and freedom in the United States?

KM: Let me start by saying that many, many people—including folks who read a lot and have a lot of education—don’t know much about Reconstruction. Sometimes a friend or an audience member will say to me something like, “Sorry if this sounds dumb, but when you say Reconstruction, what do you mean?”

There are many ways to define Reconstruction, but in this book I define it as the period when Americans first and most intensively grappled with the abolition of slavery. If you think about it that way, it’s immediately clear that this would be a highly conflictual period and that it would begin with the beginning of the Civil War. When the war started in 1861, race-based slavery had existed in English-speaking North America for some 250 years. Enslaved people had been hoping and struggling for freedom from day one of their captivity, trying in small and large ways to resist, whether by eking out modest concessions within a horrific regime, attempting to escape, or engaging in forms of sabotage against their captors.

Many white Americans, of course, benefitted from slavery and wanted it to continue. By 1861, so many pro-slavery Americans cared so much about perpetuating slavery that they attempted to separate from the United States and fought a war to try to ensure slavery’s survival. Unfortunately for them, they lost that war and, in the process, hastened slavery’s destruction. In areas that came under US occupation or where battles occurred, enslaved people escaped to Union lines in droves. Their actions were so widespread and insistent that US civilian and military officials were forced to take note and form new policies in response. I begin Reconstruction with the beginning of the Civil War, because that is when a significant new stage in the destruction of American slavery began, setting off debates and conflicts that would resonate for years to come.

JR: This makes sense. If Reconstruction begins with the destruction of slavery during the Civil War, when does it end?

KM: The conventional view is that Reconstruction ended with the resolution of the contested presidential election of 1876. As a result of violence, corruption, and confusion, it was unclear who had prevailed in three of the states: Democrat Samuel Tilden or Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Congress formed an electoral commission to determine the winner, and the result—often called the “Compromise of 1877”—is typically considered the end of Reconstruction.

Freedom Was in Sight!, by contrast, argues that it’s more useful to understand Reconstruction as having ended at the end of the 1890s. When we center the abolition of slavery in the Reconstruction narrative, the year 1877 appears comparatively insignificant. The Republican-led US government had wavered in its commitment to enforcing Black civil rights and voting rights in the South well before 1877, and sporadic efforts to do so continued after that year. Meanwhile, in many places in the South, Black men continued to exercise their rights to vote and hold office well beyond 1877. The book shows how from 1879 to 1883, the Readjuster Party of Virginia—supported by Black and white Virginians who allied in opposition to the Democrats—dramatically changed politics for a while, advocating public education for all and justice for lynching victims, for example. Such dynamics are completely missed if we end Reconstruction in 1877.

By the end of the 1890s, however, we see the consolidation of a new order known as Jim Crow. It is definitely not the multiracial democracy desired by Black people and their white allies of the Reconstruction period. But it is not what the most die-hard white supremacists wanted either. Black institutions created during Reconstruction persisted well beyond the 1890s, which among other things meant that more and more African Americans attended school and Black literacy rates continued to rise; Black churches thrived and remained hubs of community life. This is not to soft-pedal the Jim Crow order, which represented a betrayal of the best promises of Reconstruction and was characterized by terrible poverty and harrowing white violence against Black people. It is, however, to say that by the end of the 1890s the nation did not see a return to the days of slavery but, rather, the emergence of an order that was new and distinctive.

JR: Right now, I am reading Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and finding that it pairs well with Freedom Was in Sight! W. E. B. Du Bois describes Reconstruction as one of the most dramatic periods in United States history. We are talking about 4 million enslaved people becoming free, and the nation grappling with whether to grant freedom, and what their status should look like, and what that should mean on a day-to-day basis. Like you, he focuses on the everyday choices of ordinary Black people.

Why did you choose to center the everyday choices Black people made during the era of Reconstruction?

KM: Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America has been hugely influential on historians of the period. I agree that it’s well worth reading! Du Bois’s closing essay on the racism of the historical profession at the time he was writing is especially bracing. It’s titled “The Propaganda of History.”

In terms of the orientation of Freedom Was in Sight!, we knew from the beginning that it would emphasize Black people and Black history. If Reconstruction is the history of the abolition of slavery and what followed, then the people who had borne the brunt of that awful institution ought to be highlighted—their choices and their decisions and their lives. We hope the perspective provided here, which is grounded in scholarship by generations of historians, will help readers see that the people who moved from slavery to freedom in this period were real, three-dimensional human beings who had families and aspirations, who experienced joy as well as sorrow, and who tried to make their way under conditions that could be both exciting and terrible. The book is also intended to demonstrate that Black history is not marginal to the larger story of “American” history; Black history is not a subject that only some people should be interested in or responsible for knowing about. Rather, we present Black history as essential to American history writ large.

Emphasizing Black people’s lives within the history of Reconstruction can also help us see familiar histories in new ways. For example, many people think slavery was abolished when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, or when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. The reality is much more complicated. Policymakers in Washington often responded to the actions of enslaved people who showed, by escaping and by offering to serve the Union cause, what they thought the war should be about, and what freedom should mean. Those kinds of dynamics are part of what we wanted to capture in the book. Much of it illuminates how everyday people made meaning and created institutions in the wake of slavery.

JR: You really draw attention to women’s lives. Can you share some of the Black women who appear in the book, the choices they made, and why their stories are important?

KM: One thing that surprised and really delighted me was how the graphic history, as a genre, felt so well suited for representing the lives and experiences of women. Women can get submerged or sidelined in historical accounts because they aren’t as well represented in sources as men, or because we focus on aspects of life where we see a great deal of change (politics and elections, for example), as opposed to areas where changes seem to occur more slowly (family relationships or child-rearing practices, for example). The graphic history allowed us to make women literally visible in places like homes, fields, and churches. I loved that the genre made that possible.

For instance, as slavery ended, many Black families had their first opportunities to work for wages instead of being forced to work without compensation as someone else’s chattel property. Historical sources tell us that Black families often pooled their labor resources. That looked different in different places, and for different families. Very often, though, Black families decided that men and teenage children would work for wages for white employers, while women would take care of their homes and children and also grow food crops for the family’s use and to sell. In this way, Black women’s labor was absolutely essential to sustaining families and communities. We were able to show those kinds of dynamics graphically; illustrations in the book depict Black women doing things like cooking or looking after children or working in the garden, as well as working in the fields, which they also did.

This frame depicts life at Freedman’s Village, a settlement of freedpeople in what’s now Arlington County, Virginia. It exemplifies how the graphic history allowed for compelling visual representations of women’s everyday lives. The picture centers a woman with a hot dish of food and includes happy children entering the house to eat, and a man smiling as he takes off (or puts on) his shoes. The text—which begins to explain that such families were displaced from land they believed they owned—offers a foreboding contrast with the peaceful image.

Beyond showing relatively anonymous people living everyday lives in agricultural settings, the book offered wonderful opportunities to highlight the lives of individual Black women. Ida B. Wells is in the book, as is Anna Julia Cooper, who in 1886 delivered a powerful speech about the significance of Black women and girls for the project of Black freedom. One of my favorite examples of women in the book is the generations of women of the Plummer family of Prince George’s County, Maryland. During slavery, Emily Plummer was forced to live apart from her husband, Adam Plummer. Their daughter, Sarah Miranda, was essentially kidnapped from DC and sold in New Orleans right before the Civil War began. After the war, the parents, with help from their community, sent their son Henry to New Orleans to try to find his sister. Amazingly, he succeeded. Sarah Miranda had become a devout Baptist while in New Orleans, and when she returned to Prince George’s County, she led the family and their community to found a Baptist church and, later, an associated burial society. Henry and Sarah Miranda’s younger sister, Nellie, became a teacher in DC and wrote a book documenting their family’s history. Much of what we now know about the Plummer family is the result of Nellie’s efforts to collect her family’s stories and compile them in a book that she self-published in 1927. So the women of the Plummer family—Emily, Sarah Miranda, and Nellie—offer some excellent examples of the kinds of community-building, sustaining work that Black women did in this period.

JR: The book has a Black woman narrator named Emma Brown. What role does she play in the book and what does she reveal about the telling of Reconstruction in the Washington, DC, region?

KM: Freedom Was in Sight consists of a lot of different intertwined stories, not one single story, and as Liz Clarke and I finished chapter 1, I became concerned that there wouldn’t be enough glue to hold the different vignettes together. We decided that a narrator could help create that cohesiveness, providing a familiar voice and visual signpost to help readers feel like they were in good hands.

We chose Emma Brown as the narrator. In real life, Emma Brown grew up in DC as a free person of color and had the opportunity to attend Oberlin College before the Civil War began. In 1864 she was appointed to teach in DC’s first public school for Black children. She remained a prominent educator in Washington, eventually becoming the principal of the Sumner School, which was a state-of-the-art school constructed in 1872. That was a very prestigious job and she wrote that she was thrilled about it.

One reason I liked the idea of Emma Brown as the narrator was that there’s a photograph of her in the collections of the Library of Congress. So, we had a real depiction of her that Liz could use as she drew Emma for the book. I loved the idea of having a teacher as the narrator, and Liz had the brilliant idea of depicting her in front of a chalkboard on the title page of each chapter. Last but definitely not least, I thought it would be great to have a Black woman narrator for the book to model that Black women can and do have the authority to narrate history. Rather than ask whether it’s possible, the book simply and straightforwardly puts a Black woman in charge of telling the story. I hope readers will agree that she is a great narrator!

Vital and liberatory institutions created during Reconstruction did persist; people sustained those institutions, and the institutions in turn sustained people, even in very bad times.

JR: Some of the stories Brown helps tell explore how white people reacted to Black people’s freedom choices. As a Black woman and an educator from D.C., her narration provides helpful context and conveys the realities Black freedom seekers faced. It also unsettles myths of Reconstruction that have often circulated in popular culture. How did white people react to Black freedom during this period in the Washington, D.C., region and why might these reactions be important to consider?

KM: In many instances, the actions of Black Americans were shaped or limited by white people’s behaviors. White Americans were politically very divided in this period. As Emma Brown emphasizes, between 1865 and 1870, the nation adopted three new constitutional amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth. These amendments for the first time promised federal protection for basic individual rights and for Black men’s right to vote. The government was unable and ultimately unwilling to enforce the amendments, but the fact that they were ratified in the first place is a testament to the fact that many, many white Americans stood up for freedom and racial equality in this period. The book also offers examples of individual white people who were allies to Black Americans—for instance, people who promoted Black education in the South or sought to protect Black Americans against white terrorism and violence.

Yet white supremacy and white-led violence were crucial and sometimes overwhelming factors in this period. Many white Americans worked hard and very persistently to sabotage the democratic impulses of Reconstruction and to restore white rule in the absence of slavery. White folks in the DC region and elsewhere reacted violently against Black people’s assertions of freedom and attempts simply to live without being subjected to white authority. For instance, white Southerners regularly burned down Black schools in efforts not only to deprive Black communities of a cherished resource, but also to send a message of intimidation—that white people would go to violent lengths to demand Black subservience.

The book also grapples with lynching. In chapter 5, Emma Brown introduces the issue with a definition and a content warning. We discuss the 1879 lynching of James Carroll in Frederick County, Maryland. To this day, many people associate lynchings by white mobs with the Deep South, but the Equal Justice Initiative and local projects have demonstrated that such events also occurred in the DC region. The chapter also takes up the issue of police violence. There is an extensive record of racially discriminatory policing in Washington in this period, including violent arrests, beatings, and shootings of Black Washingtonians by police. The book shows not only police violence but African Americans’ mobilizations to combat it.

JR: I value the many times and ways Freedom Was in Sight! names and identifies Black resistance. One of the themes that most resonates is how Black people in DC, as well as in various counties in Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, constructed and reconstructed visions of freedom despite white backlash. For example, Black people worked diligently to find and locate loved ones, they purchased land, they fostered a sense of community and belonging, and most compellingly and often with very modest means, they founded autonomous institutions.

Earlier, you mentioned that the book tells stories about everyday people creating institutions after emancipation. What were the most important institutions for newly emancipated Black folks in and around the nation’s capital? What made these institutions so important and meaningful?

KM: One of the questions I ask when doing history is, what are the ways that people come together to try to accomplish something? Institutions are the result of people acting collectively in some kind of formalized way. Sometimes institutions can be full of conflict and disagreement. Just because people participate collectively in an organization doesn’t mean everyone gets along or agrees on what the future should look like. But institutions represent the reality that people, by working together, create structures for organizing their communities, taking care of one another, establishing lines of authority, and getting stuff done.

The Black institutions emphasized in the book are families, schools, churches, and voluntary associations. Many historians have shown that Black communities after slavery were rooted in family relationships. During the era of slavery, enslaved family members were often sold away; people cultivated loving relationships but ultimately had little control over whom they lived with. There’s extensive evidence that as slavery ended, freedpeople sought to reunite with family members; they made families the basis of their economic lives; and they cultivated relationships of care and interdependence within complex and often difficult contexts. In the book, the family is the institution that grounds all others. People began by valuing family relationships and trying to develop them, and from there—with families at the center—cultivated additional institutions such as churches, schools, and mutual aid societies.

In this frame, a young Nellie Arnold Plummer narrates her sister’s joyous homecoming. Henry Plummer arrived from New Orleans with Sarah Miranda and her toddler son on October 19, 1866. Nellie later wrote that the Plummers and their community always remembered the next day, Oct. 20, as the dawning of a new era. Sarah Miranda immediately led the local Black community in establishing a new Baptist church and later helped organize a church-affiliated burial society.

For Black institutions in the rural parts of the DC region, I relied heavily on a National Park Service study by historian Edith B. Wallace called “The Rural African American Experience, 1865–1900, in the National Capital Area.” Wallace’s study emphasized landscapes and the built environment and highlighted three key types of buildings that characterized postemancipation rural Black settlements in the region: churches, schools, and lodge halls. In the book, we used illustrations of those kinds of buildings to depict independent Black institutions and to show how they were places where community members gathered for rituals, fun, and celebration. In many cases I highlighted buildings from the period that are still standing; I hope at least a few readers will take time to visit those places.

JR: Freedom Was in Sight! does a lot of work, and if I was still a high school social studies teacher in DC—my home city—I imagine I would read this book with my students and use it in three primary ways. First, I would use it to engage students in critical conversations about Black spaces and what they meant to and for recently freed Black people in our area. Next, following the book’s lead, I would do my best to underscore freedpeople’s vision for democracy by highlighting their efforts at gaining, maintaining, and exercising political power. Finally, I would home in on the roles Black women took on during the era in our region with the hope of building on the book’s message of how important it is to preserve and narrate local histories.

This teaching approach would largely be possible because of the book’s organization and structure. Can you tell us how the book is organized and why it is structured this way?

KM: Thanks so much! Yes, the book is designed as a sort of package, in hopes that it will appeal to general readers and also be useful for educators at a variety of levels. It includes a brief introduction, the graphic history itself (which is more than 80 pages), an essay on Reconstruction that places events in the book in a broader context, eight wonderful primary sources, a timeline, an essay on sources, and a QR code that takes readers to resources developed by high school teachers for teaching it in high school classrooms. We wanted different kinds of educators to be able to imagine using the book in their classes, but we didn’t want the book to feel too textbook-y or to turn off folks who might encounter it in a bookstore or at a historic site.

JR: Building on the previous question, I’d like to talk a little more about the illustrations, which are both evocative and provocative. Chapter 5 especially reinforces the power of a graphic history as opposed to a “word-dominated, monochromatic” history of Reconstruction. Just like in the previous four chapters, we are greeted by our narrator, Emma Brown. But, unlike in those chapters, Brown’s facial expression looks very different, very solemn. Also, the first several pages use either an all-black background or dark hues, tones, and shades. The chapter brought up lots of feelings and thoughts for me. I was especially struck by the lynching of James Carroll. How do the visual choices of the chapter contribute to the stories being told throughout the book?

KM: Chapter 5, which is called “Reaction,” is the chapter that really consolidates the story of white resistance to Black freedom. A lot of thought and planning went into all the chapters, but this one probably most of all. Some of the aspects you’re describing—the black background, and how Emma Brown looks very serious—are the result of Liz Clarke’s genius. She made choices for every single panel about how to depict the characters and their facial expressions; she also suggested that we use black borders for the pages that depict James Carroll’s murder. When it came to representing the lynching itself, we took very special care.

For more than two decades I’ve been following evolving discussions of what it means to display images of lynching—and particularly of lynched Black bodies. Some of that conversation took shape in the early 2000s in response to Without Sanctuary, an exhibit of lynching photographs. Visual artists have participated in the conversation by producing art that reflects both on lynching itself and on how it has been represented. These discussions also connect to present-day conversations about the proliferation and circulation of images of Black people who have been murdered by police. Many people have made important points about how harmful it can be to be to circulate and recirculate images of murdered Black people, how such images may be disrespectful to the person who died, and how they may help entrench white supremacist ideas.

All those strands of conversation informed discussions Liz and I had via email about how to represent James Carroll’s murder by a white mob in Point of Rocks in Frederick County, Maryland. After we had a draft of the chapter, we sought input from folks including you, Jessica (thank you!), and a couple of other people who had either written about lynching or who had experience teaching about it in high school classrooms. We wanted to get people’s input on how best to avoid exposing people to the most hurtful, harmful aspects of lynching imagery, while also not sugarcoating or sidestepping the realities of history.

If Reconstruction is the history of the abolition of slavery and what followed, then the people who had borne the brunt of that awful institution ought to be highlighted—their choices and their decisions and their lives.

JR: I am really grateful for the care you two took with chapter 5. It takes great skill, and will, to use words and illustrations to simultaneously avoid depicting such a violent murder and retraumatizing readers, while also refusing to let the murderers off the hook. I think the chapter demonstrates the amount of collaboration that went into creating this book and why collaboration is so important.

One of the key takeaways of the book is that Reconstruction was a period of great transition in the United States. Americans fought for and won three constitutional amendments: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth codified birthright citizenship and promised civil rights, and the Fifteenth barred racial discrimination in the right to vote. Plus, Black people and Black institutions were developing and in many cases thriving. For the first time in its history, Americans were building a multiracial democracy. Yet, a subset of white Americans worked hard to defeat Black freedom and citizenship, and many of the gains of the period were overturned.

In some ways our present moment seems reminiscent of the end of Reconstruction, sometimes called the “nadir” of Black history. A cacophony of threats to democracy have been orchestrated in ways that remind me of the events at the end of the 1890s and make me very uncomfortable.

Do you want to say anything about how this book connects to our current historic moment? Are there ways you think your book might offer some insights on where the United States is headed?

KM: Historians often think about time horizons and how we represent them. We ask where to begin and end the story we are telling, and also what constitutes the ending of a given period and what features of that period might persist beyond its designated ending. If you suggest that the end of Reconstruction meant the shutting down of all of the period’s possibilities for freedom and democracy, then you have no way of accounting for the continuing proliferation of Black institutions after the “end” of Reconstruction, the growing literacy rate, the Black colleges that trained generations of Black leaders, the growth and development of Black churches, the flourishing of Black arts and culture in cities like New York and Washington, DC, in the early 20th century, and more. I hope the end of Freedom Was in Sight conveys that even as Reconstruction ended and the Jim Crow order took shape in the South, not everything was lost. Vital and liberatory institutions created during Reconstruction did persist; people sustained those institutions, and the institutions in turn sustained people, even in very bad times.

We could apply that kind of perspective to this moment too. I hate to say anything that sounds Pollyannaish because I’m actually very, very worried about what’s going on right now. Time continues to unfold, however, and we aren’t always aware of how the things we do might make a difference, not only right away but down the road. The institutions that we build, the groups we participate in, the efforts that we make toward freedom, human equality, and dignity—we do those in our own moments for our own reasons, and we simply cannot know what the future holds. If we feel like our efforts are failing in the moment, we can’t know whether they are actually failing over the long term. I think one of the perspectives you get from history is the knowledge that things do change and people and institutions do make a difference. The alternative, capitulating, is also never the better choice. 

Featured photograph: Kate Masur.