We insist that hxstory is a current event. That the personal is political. That contradiction is the building block of change. That We change ourselves in order to change the world. That we are One whole human spirit…

Reconstruction, Incorporated emerged as a vehicle for community change in the early 1990s. Our story below draws on a host of materials from over the years since — including videos, photos, meeting notes, and Reconstruction founder William Goldby’s 2023 open letter.

Foundations

In the video [see below] “Grounded While Walls Fall” (2016), William begins by describing his own seed of what would eventually become Reconstruction, Inc — a support group he convened in the early 1980s in Seattle for Black men — angry, smoking, drinking ex-cons. Several years later, in May of 1988, William attended the 3rd annual commemoration of the MOVE bombing at the Arch Street Meeting House in Philadelphia, where he’d since relocated. As he tells the story, “The spirit moved me to stand and challenge any organization to meet me halfway to design a program that would address the rage of black men.” (This moment was also captured on video [see below/right: “William Goldsby Speaks at 1988 MOVE Bombing Commemoration”].)

Over the next several years, with the support of advisors and institutions, the new non-profit organization Reconstruction, Inc ran an Afrocentric program for men twice-convicted of violent offenses inside the State Correctional Institute at Graterford (SCI-Graterford outside Philadelphia). This same program supported these same men returning from state-prison into an apartment-building in North Philadelphia. The video “Stop the Nonsense” (1996) documented these programs developing in Nicetown-Tioga; Reconstruction members produced the video in collaboration with Scribe Video Center’s Community Visions.

In 1993, the Lifers Association at SCI-Graterford (i.e. men serving sentences of Life Without Parole) convened a meeting between several of their family members and supporters and William. This group eventually cohered behind the name Fight For Lifers (FFL). “We agreed to prioritize three focuses: Juvenile Life Without Parole, the contradictions within the commutation process, and the Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA).  I [William Goldsby] volunteered to be at the center of FFL’s work in the spirit of reciprocity, and Reconstruction adopted FFL as its political domain in 2003.” Fight for Lifers became the first of five domains/programs through which Reconstruction operated as a 501c3 organization. Over the next 20 years four additional domains of work emerged to make five total; the domains were later also known as Reconstruction’s “programs.”

Domains / Programs Develop

1. Fight For Lifers (FFL) worked to abolish the life-sentence (also called Death By Incarceration) inside Pennsylvania. It also served as Reconstruction’s political arm.
2.  The Alumni Ex-Offenders Association (AEA) functioned to politicize returning citizens. AEA facilitated multiple projects to this end, including the History and Reconstruction project, as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s ‘Reconstructions Atmosphere’ — griot Denise Valentine describes that project on video [below/right].
3. Leadership, Education, Advocacy, Development (LEAD) was designed for young people to develop leadership and to make sense of the world they inherited. Projects included building a wood clubhouse in Nicetown-Tioga. Reconstruction also introduced a group of young people to cooperative business in collaboration with Villanova University, and most recently, we produced a podcast.
4. Reconstruction II was organized as a think-tank, which published academic research in support of abolition democracy.
5. Noble Pillars was the incubator through which Reconstruction sponsored various community initiatives across Philadelphia, such as: Youth Art and Self-Empowerment Project (YASP), the Human Rights Coalition, DeCarcerate PA, the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), Let’s Get Free, and the MOVE organization.

The Community Capacity-Building Curriculum

The shared lessons from years of building and rebuilding with people in SCI-Graterford and Nicetown-Tioga was formalized in the Community Capacity-Building Curriculum (CCBC). Particularly since 2018, the CCBC became a generative catalyst for collaborative group-study. “The aim of the CCBC is to build collective processes where we can transcend any form of supremacy (whether that be white, Black, gender, class or any other form of dominance).” In 2021, a working group formalized the CCBC in a teaching-guide format. The CCBC has been facilitated in multiple university settings, community settings, and online/hybrid formats during and after the Covid-pandemic.

Transitioning beyond the 501c3 Paradigm

Since 2018, Reconstruction’s leadership made at least three concerted efforts to invite and cultivate new leadership from the organization’s broader community. New Board members signed on, and new Domain members stepped forward. Consistent with the organization’s previous structure, leadership emerged from grassroots community-building and learned about self-governance by doing it themselves. However, administrative tasks consistently challenged both new Board members and domain leaders in the face of ongoing personal, familiar and political issues. No critical mass of members grew inside the program-domains.

In response to this situation in the spring of 2023, the Executive Board recommended forfeiting the organization’s 501c3 status so that members could focus on the most pressing issues at hand without the administrative burden of maintaining a 501c3. In their final communication, they stated: “As an Executive Committee, we formally resign from our administration of the 501c3 non-profit (Reconstruction, Inc). Our other Board members resigned as of March 1st, 2023. Reconstruction’s 501c3 tax status will formally expire in 2024…Reconstruction, INC. is in a period of transition and growth. The Executive Committee (EC) has been spearheading the effort to restructure Reconstruction, INC. so that we can continue the work of Changing Ourselves to Change the World.” With and without the 501c3 tax status, this central objective remains the same, and We continue to work together with this shared purpose. The Resources tab offers some of our most recent work in this vein.

Foundations beneath us…

The organization took its name from the Reconstruction era of these United States when — following the legal abolition of slavery and civil war during the 1860s — our more recent ancestors worked to establish a self-determined, inclusive concept of citizenship for African American people. Fatefully, the federal government, wealthy elites, and organized white supremacists (such as the KKK) aborted Reconstruction’s progress in the late 1860s. This historical power-grab anticipates our colonial, carceral society today where the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted…”) has been dramatically exploited to justify and legalize racialized mass incarceration in prisons and detention centers.

Both W.E.B. Du Bois and Mao Tse-Tung’s writings have shaped our political education.

Photo: W. E. B. Du Bois with Mao Tse-tung in a garden, Lake Country, Central China, March 1959 from https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-i0741