Tracing the cycles of Black empowerment, white backlash
Civil rights protesters march along Constitution Avenue carrying placards, from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, during the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.
AP/File
Conversations about the period of Reconstruction after the American Civil War are reminders of a familiar saying: “perception is reality.” Whether the discussion is about lost causes or liberation, interpretations of the period can be as divisive as the era itself.
Peniel E. Joseph’s latest book, “The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century,” is as much commentary as it is based in fact. It’s a masterpiece that not only captures the last 150 years, but also paints a picture of what the future might look like.
Appreciating “The Third Reconstruction” requires some understanding of the first. For formerly enslaved people and their allies, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 ushered in the hope that the United States could fulfill its moral promise of democracy, freedom, and equality. For a brief three decades after the war, about 2,000 Black men in the former Confederate states held public office.
Why We Wrote This
Understanding the patterns of history gives us insights into the present day. A historian ties together three distinct eras in which Black progress was disrupted by white opposition.
The white backlash against Black empowerment was rapid and ferocious. Lynchings deprived Black people of their lives, while Jim Crow laws prevented them from exercising newly won freedom. And for the next century, white historians erased evidence of Black agency and resistance, and ignored the service of 179,000 Black soldiers in the Union Army. They portrayed Reconstruction, with its insistence on Black citizenship, as a debacle – a view that has been taught to generations of students.
Ultimately, Joseph’s book describes three distinct “reconstruction” periods. These were spans in which Americans seemed ready to grapple with the nation’s history of anti-Black racism and to take the first steps toward building a new, more inclusive society. The first reconstruction followed the bloody Civil War and lasted from about 1865-98; the second encompassed the Civil Rights era from 1954-68; and the third began with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and continued through the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Debt to W.E.B. Du Bois
In 1935, sociologist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois published “Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880,” in part as a corrective to the prevailing narrative put forward by white historians. As Joseph writes in “The Third Reconstruction,” “Du Bois viewed Reconstruction as more than just a missed opportunity, interpreting the post-Civil War decades as the nation’s second founding.”
Joseph, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, uses Du Bois’ book as a point of reference as he outlines the struggle for racial justice. What makes Joseph’s book distinctive is a Du Bois trait – pointing out evidence of “duality” in the ongoing national story, in which “America remains a nation riven by cruel juxtapositions between slavery and freedom, wealth and inequality, beauty and violence.”
Duality is reflected in what Du Bois and other Black sociologists called “double consciousness,” the mindset of Black people who had been subjugated by white supremacy. At the same time that they resented racism, Black people also measured themselves in some ways by the standards of a discriminatory society.
At the heart of Joseph’s book lies the conflict between what he calls “reconstructionists” and “redemptionists.” Reconstructionists are described as champions of Black citizenship and Black dignity, while redemptionists “paper over racial, class, and gender hierarchies through an allegiance to white supremacy” in pursuit of a so-called “colorblind” society.
Joseph ties recent events, such as the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump, to the anti-democratic violence that stopped the first Reconstruction in its tracks. He points out that anti-Black rhetoric and violence allowed the “denigration of Black humanity.”
Joseph also uses sections of the book to explore concepts such as citizenship, dignity, backlash, leadership, and freedom. A commentary on citizenship both celebrates and criticizes Obama’s legacy. The author, who organized for the Obama campaign, calls the former president to account for “his refusal to confront the deeper history behind present-day political and racial divisions.”
Striving toward MLK’s “Beloved Community”
Malcolm X famously declared “I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.” Joseph inverts those words for the title of his introduction, “A Nightmare Is Still a Dream,” to ensure that hope accompanies America’s harsh history. He writes: “I hope this book allows readers to take a historical journey that enables them to see America and its people through new eyes, and in so doing to understand and to retell a different story about the past, one that speaks to the present with enough grace to transform the nation’s future.”
Joseph honors his mother, his Haitian American roots, and his education in a way that powerfully notes the Black experience – one that is both hopeful and harrowing. He celebrates the leadership of Black women, from Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer to Nikole Hannah-Jones and Stacey Abrams.
The third reconstruction is still a work in progress, Joseph writes. The country and world that we craft moving forward, Joseph explains, can share the vision of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s “Beloved Community.”
“I believe that the struggle for Black dignity and citizenship can be achieved in our lifetime. But it must continue even if it takes several lifetimes,” Joseph writes. “Americans of all backgrounds can choose love over fear, community building over anxiety, equity over racial privilege, and dignity over shame and punishment.”