Trump’s victory shattered the national consensus forged in the civil rights era, which helped to launch a new era of voter suppression using tactics that recalled two earlier periods of Reconstruction.

The era was a hinge moment in American history.ĭonald Trump’s ascent to the White House did more than tip the scales in favor of redemptionists. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. In retrospect, Americans experienced a 50-year period of national consensus on racial justice between JFK’s June 11, 1963, racial equity speech before the nation and the June 25, 2013, Shelby v. Kennedy through President Barack Obama, the civil rights era institutionalized a fragile national consensus that supported the struggle for Black citizenship and dignity as a political and moral good. This early iteration of the contemporary cultural wars was rooted then, as now, in longstanding racial divisions centered around contested legacies of capitalism and democracy.īut America’s Second Reconstruction transformed the social compact for Black folk, and the legacies from this period still reverberate nationally. They mainstreamed a false vision of a white supremacist American history - popularized in the novel “The Klansman” and the films “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind” - that justified anti-Black violence as the cost of a national reunion. 6′s meaning for American democracy by Republican and Democratic Party officials reflect debates, conflicts, and divisions that can be traced back to the convulsive world built in the aftermath of the Civil War and legal and policy decisions that continue to impact Americans only vaguely aware of this history.īy the 20th century, redemptionists, who lost the war, had decisively won the peace. The passage of the Enforcement Acts gave the federal government new powers to curtail anti-Black violence by allowing for the federal prosecution of terror groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, which the Grant administration used sparingly before ultimately abandoning the cause of Black citizenship.

In 1873, more than 100 Black people were massacred in Colfax, La., by white Fusionists (an alliance of conservative Republicans and Democrats) after an all-Black militia had taken over the courthouse to protect the duly elected Republican government from white mob violence. Back then, elected officials listened to harrowing testimony of Black Americans victimized by racial terror amid a political backlash aided and abetted by local officials who collaborated with racial terrorists and a federal government that frequently ignored violent massacres quaintly referred to as “outrages.” For example, in 1868, a white mob in Camilla, Ga., killed numerous Black people in the state’s southwestern region, marking the beginning of the end of African American political power in rural areas. 6 hearings find their historical analogue in the congressional hearings investigating anti-Black violence by the Ku Klux Klan that unfolded in January 1871. 6, 2021, contains a direct throughline across three periods of Reconstruction in America - from the eruption of white racial terror campaigns that stalled the First Reconstruction to the white violence that greeted Black people who tried to vote, eat at restaurants, swim at beaches, travel on buses, or stay in hotels during the Second Reconstruction to our current discontents.

The violence that erupted at the nation’s capital on Jan.

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