Why the Struggle for a Third Reconstruction Remains the Struggle for Our Times

This article introduces NPQ’s series, Toward a Third Reconstruction, co-produced with Dēmos. Authors in this series articulate why we need bold, courageous action to bring a Third Reconstruction within reach—and offer strategies for systemic change that can help us get there.

Since 1865 and the end of a cataclysmic Civil War in which an estimated 698,000 Americans perished, the United States has been locked in a narrative war between Reconstructionists and Redemptionists—those who wanted to build a multiracial democracy and those who wanted to redeem or restore White rule.

US Reconstruction represented an experiment in multiracial democracy—the first of its kind. Since the Civil War, US history has waxed and waned between two competing visions of the republic’s future.

Racial slavery’s end marked the creation of a new US republic.

Despite setbacks, betrayals, and shortcomings, advocates of multiracial democracy remain steadfast in their pursuit of racial justice and human dignity for all people in the United States, even as opponents have relentlessly attacked this vision through legislation, policy, and legal means—as well as violence, disinformation, and outright lies. Today’s struggle for a “Third Reconstruction” speaks to this long, ongoing conflict.

The Post–Civil War Rebirth of the United States

Reconstruction represents a second founding of the United States—an effort to confront the nation’s original sin of racial slavery and institutionalize Black citizenship for previously enslaved African Americans who, even in captivity, forged a deep love for a country not yet in existence, but one they vowed to make a reality.

Racial slavery’s end marked the creation of a new US republic, where expansive notions of citizenship became consecrated in constitutional amendments, families were reunited, and historically Black colleges and universities were founded. At the same time, one-room schoolhouses sprang up as markers of educational aspiration, and churches supported spiritual and political renewal of lost, hungry, and ambitious souls in search of opportunities to lead lives of dignity and full citizenship.

The period between the 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and the White-led racial massacre in Wilmington, NC, in 1898 represents the First Reconstruction in US history, a time of vastly expanded opportunities for the four million Black Americans who struggled, and won, their freedom through service as soldiers, civil rights activists, abolitionists, and self-emancipated “contrabands” who fled Southern plantations as Union troops (including the United States Colored Troops beginning in 1863) descended upon the Confederacy.

Black Americans at the local, state, and national levels assumed elected office in states that once held them in bondage. They sought to expand multiracial democracy; fund public schools and works projects; and reimagine freedom, citizenship, dignity, and democracy. These Americans, alongside White allies in Congress, the Republican Party, and ordinary citizens, were Reconstructionists. They were supporters, in word and deed, of multiracial democracy and of a republic whose ideas of freedom surpassed the philosophical intent of the nation’s founders.

An unapologetic movement for White supremacy at first haunted, then overwhelmed Reconstruction advocates. In 1866, the same year Fisk University, which would claim the scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois as its most eminent graduate, was founded in Nashville, TN, the Ku Klux Klan emerged 70 miles to the south in Pulaski.

Racist violence in the South violated the physical safety of Black Americans. The passage of the Black Codes curtailed the movement of the newly freed Black populace, the Grandfather Clause circumvented voting rights, and the institutionalization of systems of sharecropping and peonage forced Black labor into a mean season of servitude. The advent of the convict leasing system that racially profiled, criminalized, and incarcerated Black people during Reconstruction inaugurated a system of carceral punishment that continues well into the 21st century.

The advocates of White supremacy and anti-Black racism who came to political power through violence, legislative and legal means, and the corruption of political institutions vowed to “redeem” the South from the alleged scourges of Black citizenship and multiracial democracy.

Redemptionists lost the Civil War, but through extralegal violence and bad-faith political maneuvers, they won the peace. The new political order of Jim Crow segregation that they advocated was portrayed as the happy result of White manhood defending traditional Christian and familial values. From this perspective, lynching was seen as a heroic act in defense of kith and kin; segregation was asserted to be the natural biological and cultural separation of races, which represented distinct kinds of human beings.

Most importantly, these antidemocratic forces of White supremacy won the narrative war. Reconstruction’s end opened the dam of White retribution with a vengeance and violence that remains almost unfathomable, peaking with dozens of racist pogroms (Atlanta, 1906; Springfield, IL, 1908; Elaine, AR, 1919; Chicago, 1919; Tulsa, OK, 1921; Rosewood, FL, 1923) that even reached Black people who had previously fled the South for the supposed safety of the North.

A Second Reconstruction

Brutal repression and political violence were not the end of the story, however. A long civil rights movement began to emerge nationally and in the South during the New Deal period of the 1930s, leading to a renewed movement in the United States for multiracial democracy.

The high point of the nation’s Second Reconstruction unfolded between the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court decision that declared “separate but equal” schools—and the cruel society this doctrine sanctioned—unconstitutional; and the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

These years comprise the civil rights movement’s heroic period; an epic where sharecroppers, laborers, preachers, and students—two generations removed from slavery and still in the throes of lynching and gruesome racial violence—led a movement for radical democracy that transformed the nation.

Reconstructionists [in the 1960s] for the first time…won the narrative war over the meaning of citizenship and dignity, freedom, and multiracial democracy.

From the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 to 1956, to the Little Rock Central High School confrontation of 1957, to the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) in the wake of lunch-counter sit-ins protesting segregated restaurants, that movement for Black dignity and citizenship helped to ignite a national movement for Reconstruction.

However, resistance was fierce, with some characterizing it as a second domestic civil war. A veritable rogues gallery of Southern governors, from Mississippi’s Ross Barnett to Alabama’s George Wallace, rose to national infamy through their defense of White supremacy that made them political heroes to racists across the nation.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew a quarter of a million Americans in support of multiracial democracy on August 28, 1963. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech distilled the moral and political framework for reimagining democracy as a collective endeavor. We rightfully commemorate the watershed legislation that followed that march—namely, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Yet the most important part of the nation’s Second Reconstruction is less discussed. Reconstructionists, for the first time in US history, won the narrative war over the meaning of citizenship and dignity, freedom, and multiracial democracy. They argued, successfully, that racial justice must be the beating heart of a reimagined democracy.

Perhaps none did so as eloquently as writer James Baldwin, whose bestselling book of essays, The Fire Next Time—released in January 1963—distilled the arbitrary results of Redemptionists having betrayed the promise of the second republic created in the aftermath of a bloody civil war.

What President John F. Kennedy characterized, during a bravura June 11, 1963, televised civil rights address as “the fires of frustration and discord” proved to be a revolution. The assassinations of Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers the following day; of four Black girls and two boys, Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware, in Birmingham on September 15; and, most shockingly, President Kennedy on November 22, became the crucible through which the nation allowed itself to be remade. These iconic martyrs, alongside countless others, ushered in a 50-year racial justice consensus that ended with the Supreme Court’s 2013 5–4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder eliminating Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and ushering in a backlash against Reconstructionist policies that continues to grow.

A New Backlash

From a certain perspective, the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama signaled the outlines of a third effort at Reconstruction, alongside Black Lives Matter’s emergence in 2013, and the racial and political reckoning of 2020 in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

For a time, it seemed as if a new era of racial justice, reconciliation, and multiracial democracy might take hold. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) became part of the national discourse on race during a year when an estimated 15 to 26 million Americans hit the streets to protest racial injustice and police brutality and demand institutions that could help unleash the potential of multiracial democracy.

The January 6, 2021, assault on the nation’s capital proved emblematic of the Redemptionists’ efforts to quash multiracial democracy and Black citizenship and dignity in tandem. The violent push to overturn the lawful election of Joseph Biden to the White House, an effort supported by the defeated incumbent, Donald Trump, has, since the shameful day, been successfully reimagined by the right wing in this nation as a lawful assemblage of patriots who were brutalized by law enforcement, the exact opposite of the truth and the facts of that day.

Even before the second Trump presidency, the backlash to efforts at repairing centuries of racial injustice and antidemocratic systems had begun at the level of the ongoing narrative war. Conservative bloggers targeted the 1619 Project, DEI, critical race theory, and Black history as part of a left-wing ideology of “wokeness” designed to destroy children, hurt White people, and allow unqualified “minorities” to get jobs that they neither earned nor deserved.

The Road Ahead

A Third Reconstruction begins with forging a new racial justice consensus grounded in mutual respect for human life and a shared concept of dignity. Either everyone counts or none of us do. Dignity is what each human soul carries within them.

The stories in this series represent an effort to advance this conversation and consider how different actors—ranging from labor unions to immigrant rights advocates to community organizers to philanthropy—can most effectively participate in this struggle.

During this time of racist backlash, censorship, fearmongering, hatred, and rising authoritarianism, advocates must stand firm on the shoulders of those who faced even more daunting odds in the past, and on the principles that King characterized as a “beloved community.”

King defined the beloved community as more than civil and voting rights. He articulated a conception of radical citizenship that included a living wage, decent housing, healthcare, quality education, and the freedom to live in peace, which required an end to conflict zones in the United States and abroad.

A reconstructionist vision of the United States needs a full-throated embrace of voting rights; defending Black lives and people of color; and opposing anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment that undergirds the current shameful and violent backlash.

A Third Reconstruction unapologetically embraces justice as the beating heart of an expansive multiracial democracy.

In retrospect, the half-century racial justice consensus, forged in the crucible of the civil rights movement domestically and the anticolonial freedom surge internationally, attests to the strengths of longstanding institutions, just as its demise today illustrates the shattering vulnerabilities of those same structures.

Yet there is tangible reason for hope. There are, mercifully, tens of millions of people in the United States who vehemently disagree with the nation’s current direction. The task ahead is not simply to reverse the catastrophic political tides of the present, but to ennoble the country and begin a new era of national renewal centered on the pursuit of inclusive multiracial democracy.

This requires multiracial and multi-issue political coalitions rooted in local organizing that connect the daily struggles of ordinary people—including those living in red states—to the hopes and dreams, as well as the political and economic challenges, of those residing in seemingly politically shielded blue states. Recognizing that what troubles one of us impacts us all follows in the spirit of King, who famously reminded us that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

A Third Reconstruction unapologetically embraces justice as the beating heart of an expansive multiracial democracy. We must craft a narrative of hope from the troubled present—one rooted in building a movement for multiracial democracy robust enough to make the beloved community a reality in our lifetimes.

This centers on the public recognition of claims of racial and economic justice as a cultural, political, and moral good.

Our dreams of freedom require bold thinking, personal courage, and hearts big enough to understand that beyond this current moment of heartbreak lies an undiscovered country of human dignity that allows us to finally fulfill the long delayed, but no longer denied, promise of multiracial democracy.