THE THIRD RECONSTRUCTION

A noted scholar of political history offers a hopeful vision of a future in which Black Americans take their places as full, equal citizens of the U.S.

Joseph, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas, provocatively links the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to the anti-Black violence of the Reconstruction era, a time of entrenched Jim Crow policies, which, he reminds readers, was not confined to the South. That first Reconstruction period was followed by a second, in his reckoning, which expanded from Brown v. Board of Education to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The third, which began with the election of Barack Obama, is “the most volatile yet.” By Joseph’s account, the White nationalism espoused by Donald Trump and those rioters hinges on two lies: “The first is that Black people are not human beings. The second is that the first lie never happened.” One need not be a far right-winger to embrace “redemptionist” rhetoric that imposes school segregation in the name of “parental choice” and voter suppression in the name of election security. Of course, the Trumpian backlash against the Obama years was grounded in “white nostalgia over the nation’s regime of racial slavery and grievance over that system’s demise.” Each era of reconstruction has brought renewed violence by those who insist on White supremacy, most recently as exemplified by the police murder of George Floyd and countless other Black Americans. Through joint actions with feminists, gay rights activists, other oppressed minorities, and allies, Black people have been able to assert their rights anew with the Black Lives Matter movement, bringing new vigor to the dismantling of redemptionist racism and resistance against “racial segregation, exploitation, and death”—a cause that, the author argues, can reach its goals within our lifetime.

Joseph successfully links episodes in the struggle for civil rights to form a continuum of injustice and resolution.