[Peniel Joseph’s history of the three Reconstructions.]
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THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE  
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Robert Greene II
February 22, 2023
The Nation
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_ Peniel Joseph’s history of the three Reconstructions. _

The Black Panthers’ Liberation School, San Francisco, 1969. , UPI /
Getty

 

When it comes to understanding modern politics, analogies abound. We
have the 1938 Munich conference as a metaphor for the perils of being
“weak” on foreign policy. Modern hyper-partisanship has driven
comparisons to the 1850s and the lead-up to the Civil War. With the
combination of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests,
and a new wave of strikes roiling the nation, scholars and journalists
have compared our current moment to the 1918 influenza pandemic and
the following year’s Red Summer, when the United States appeared to
be on fire with strikes and protests from coast to coast.

THE THIRD RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA’S STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE IN
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 

By Peniel E. Joseph 

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One of the most potent analogies has been that of Reconstruction. The
term was coined during the Civil War to describe the plan to readmit
the secessionist states and push the South to transition to a
post-slavery economy. It took on a new life in the 1950s and ’60s,
when civil rights activists and observers began to refer to a
“Second Reconstruction.” For them, the first had been an
incomplete revolution: Black men gained the right to vote and Black
people in general became—however fitfully—part of the American
body politic, but these gains were soon dismantled by white Southern
violence and political intimidation and white Northern indifference.
The radicals of the 1950s and ’60s set out to try again, hoping to
both expand and finish the job of the first Reconstruction 100 years
later. In his famous speech in Montgomery, Ala., celebrating the
culmination of the Selma to Montgomery marches and the 1965 voting
rights campaign, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. laid out the case for
the importance of the first Reconstruction and the urgent need for a
second one. Describing the end of Reconstruction as a “travesty of
justice,” King stated in defiance of Southern segregationists that
“we are on the move now.”

Much was achieved during this Second Reconstruction, but like the
first it remained unfinished. The economic disparities between Black
and white Americans continued to be a major problem. Meanwhile, an
ascendant right challenged the victories of the civil rights movement,
even as legal segregation was destroyed. As C. Vann Woodward, the
eminent historian of the South, presciently noted in a 1965 essay
in _Harper’s_, there would likely come a time when the American
polis would recognize the need for a Third Reconstruction. Woodward
revised and republished the _Harper’s _piece in a book of
essays, _The Burden of Southern History_, in 1968. “It may be that
in due course,” Woodward wrote, “say on the eve of the Third
Reconstruction, some enterprising historian will bring out a monograph
on the Compromise that ended the Second Reconstruction, entitled
perhaps _The Triumph of Tokenism_.”

Woodward’s premonition comes to mind when reading Peniel Joseph’s
new book, _The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial
Justice in the Twenty-First Century_. A scholar of the Black Power
movement, Joseph turns his attention here to Black America’s plight
since the beginning of the 1980s. For Joseph, not to mention many
others, the need to reckon with the history of the last 40 years is
paramount if we are to finally complete the work of Reconstruction.
Inspired by the events of Barack Obama’s presidency, the rise of
Black Lives Matter in the 2010s, the crises of Covid and the January 6
insurrection, and his own early life experiences, Joseph offers a book
that seeks to understand the post–civil rights history of Black
America.

The origins of his career as a historian, Joseph tells us, can be
found in the classrooms of New York City in the 1980s and in his home,
growing up with a mother of Haitian descent. He could not understand
how life could be so difficult for the young men and women who looked
like him when, at the same time, the teachers at his Catholic school
were telling him and the other students of the greatness of America
during and after the civil rights movement. “I began to notice this
gap in our perceptions,” Joseph writes, explaining in a short but
powerful statement what it means to be Black in America. The promise
of the civil rights and Black Power era remained unfulfilled, and so
Black Americans—and the rest of the country—needed to renew the
struggle to secure what the Reconstructions of the past had tried but
failed to achieve.

Joseph has spent much of his career pushing Americans to reexamine
what they think they know about the Black Power movement of the 1960s
and ’70s. Currently, he serves in several roles at the University of
Texas at Austin: as the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political
Values; as an associate dean for justice, equity, diversity, and
inclusion; and as the founding director of the Center for the Study of
Race and Democracy. His first book, _Waiting ‘Til the Midnight
Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America_, was a landmark
text that tied together the resurgence of Black nationalism in the
1950s and the rise of the Nation of Islam in the early 1960s, the
Black Panthers in the late ’60s, and the Pan-Africanists in the
1970s.

Since then, Joseph has written about such figures as Kwame Ture
(formerly Stokely Carmichael) in _Stokely: A Life_ and argued
against accounts that posit a simplistic and ideologically hostile
relationship between MLK and Malcolm X in _The Sword and the Shield:
The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr._ In
his 2010 work _Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack
Obama_, Joseph explored how the post–Voting Rights Act era became a
radical moment of political, cultural, and intellectual debate among
Black Americans.

Now, in _The Third Reconstruction_, Joseph extends his work on Black
Power and Black life in post–World War II America to the present by
insisting that a clear understanding of the 1980s and ’90s is
necessary to grasp the current social movements for freedom in
America. In many ways, _The Third Reconstruction_ expands and
develops the arguments found in Manning Marable’s _Race, Reform,
and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America_.
Revised several times, with its subtitle changing to reflect the
updates, Marable’s book tracks the growing frustration with the
achievements of the civil rights movement among a new generation of
Black scholars and activists. The first edition was released in 1984,
the second in 1991. By 2007, when the third (and final) edition was
published, Marable had had time to reflect on how much his own
thinking had changed in the past 25 years. In the book’s first
edition, he argued that by 1982, the civil rights gains of the ’60s
and ’70s were under threat from “the triumph of Reaganism.” In a
revised chapter for the 1991 edition, Marable argued that “in many
respects the state of American race relations reached a new nadir in
the late 1980s and early 1990s.” By the 21st century, he was
offering an even grimmer view: After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he
could see that his earlier assessments had not fully appreciated how
much work was still needed to fix the United States. “The awful
specter of black bodies floating in New Orleans,” he wrote, “of
hundreds of thousands being dispersed throughout the country and being
denied constructive federal aid, underscored just how enduring the
great racial and class divides are within the fabric and logic of
American institutions of power.”

In many ways, Joseph picks up where Marable left off. Reflecting on
the difficulty of the historical parallels he hopes to draw in _The
Third Reconstruction_, he agrees with Marable that the two earlier
Reconstructions did not go far enough. While the country’s problems
in the 1970s and ’80s weren’t the same as those in the 1870s,
Joseph does note some troubling parallels. In the 1860s and ’70s,
the brief hopeful period of Reconstruction was overwhelmed by the long
era of Redemption and then by Jim Crow segregation, while in the 1960s
and ’70s, the country saw the destruction of most Black radical
political organizations, the assassination of numerous Black leaders,
and a broader right-wing attack on the achievements of the civil
rights and Black Power movements. Figures like Julian Bond, an
activist turned Democratic Party politician in Georgia, repeatedly
lamented the erosion of these gains in the late 1970s and the ’80s,
especially during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. In 1982, Bond argued
against Reagan’s attempt to weaken the Voting Rights Act that year,
saying: “If the president prevails, voting rights will perish, and
black Americans will be a voteless—and a hopeless—people once
again.”

Joseph experienced firsthand the on-the-ground stakes of this reality.
Coming of age during the Reagan era, he grew up in a New York City
that was defined by Reagan’s conservatism on race and the welfare
state, along with an expanding War on Drugs. For Joseph, Barack
Obama’s election in 2008 represented the promise of “a new vision
of US citizenship,” one that would live up to the nation’s
greatest statements on freedom and democracy. Instead, Joseph argues,
Trump’s election after the Obama era became a reminder that “white
backlash contains multitudes.” But the Obama years also ushered in
the Black Lives Matter movement, which continued the long Black
radical tradition of keeping America honest about its many issues with
race and democracy.

One of the strengths of _The Third Reconstruction _is how carefully
Joseph captures the history that was taking place during his
adolescence. He spares no one among the country’s political leaders,
criticizing Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for
their inability to escape the neo-Redemptionist ideas inherent in the
“law and order” rhetoric popularized by Richard Nixon in the late
1960s. The frustrations with Carter in the late 1970s among Black
leaders and lay citizens alike, Joseph notes, were early warnings
about the lack of progress for Black Americans after the civil rights
era. Clinton, of course, proved far worse: He used his own brand of
law-and-order politics, crafted by the Democratic Leadership Council
and the party’s moderate wing, to propel the Democrats back into the
White House after 12 years in the political wilderness. “A
bipartisan consensus forged in the maelstrom of America’s Second
Reconstruction,” Joseph writes, “substituted racially charged
symbols—of crime, drug addiction, welfare, public schools, the King
holiday—over dismantling structural racism.”

For Joseph, all of this appeared to be changing with Obama’s
election, given how much he had spoken of the need to take action on
the long-festering issues of racial inequality. But very quickly,
Joseph notes, Obama’s vision of hope began to collide with political
realities: His call for “national unity became entangled with the
cords of America’s racial past, which hindered its fulfillment in
both new and tragically familiar ways.” Obama needed to take bold
and decisive action to address the nation’s political, social, and
cultural wounds, and yet he did the exact opposite. The actions needed
to remake the United States into a true democracy would be difficult,
and Obama proved unwilling to embrace the conflict that would come
with it. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement marked a growing
frustration with Obama, but as Joseph observes, the few gains that
were won during the Obama years also created a space for the rise of a
white nationalism that found its voice in Donald Trump. “Seeking to
redeem America from the scourge of Black equality,” Joseph writes,
“Trump and his supporters looked less to Nixon than to the
Reconstruction-era South Carolina demagogue Ben Tillman and his
violent supporters.”

Joseph compares Trump’s neo-Redemptionist rise with that of Tillman,
who became South Carolina’s governor and later senator. Working as
part of the “Red Shirts” in the 1870s, Tillman led the white
supremacist violence that disrupted and ultimately destroyed Black
political power in the state for generations. As South Carolina’s
governor in the 1890s, he spearheaded the effort to draft a new state
constitution that would end Black voting rights without technically
violating the language of the new 14th and 15th amendments to the US
Constitution. The 1895 state Constitution would do just that,
replacing the more progressive 1868 Constitution adopted during
Reconstruction. In a speech on the floor of the US Senate in 1900,
Tillman boasted that this suppression of Black votes was his goal:
“Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took up the
matter calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of
disenfranchising as many of them as we could under the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments.”

Trump did not seek to completely dismantle Black voting rights, nor
was he as successful at achieving the frightening rollback of basic
freedoms that Tillman and his followers sought. But he did
“normalize white supremacy in contemporary American politics,”
Joseph notes, through his lukewarm response to the Unite the Right
rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where one person was killed
and dozens more injured in a car attack on the anti-racist
counterprotesters, as well as through his utilization of the kind of
white supremacist rhetoric once consigned to the margins of the far
right.

Placing Trump in the tradition of Tillman, as well as the massacre in
Hamburg, S.C., in 1876 and the Wilmington Coup of 1898, makes clear
how dangerous he is not just to Black Americans but to the basic ideas
of democracy, self-determination, and civil and political rights. But
that means we should also reconsider whether this is indeed a Third
Reconstruction or, potentially, another reversal in the struggle for
Black freedom and equality. In 2010, _The Black Scholar_ published
“The New Nadir: The Contemporary Black Racial Formation,” by the
historian Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, in which he argued that despite the
election of the nation’s first Black president, the material
conditions of Black Americans had only gotten worse in the wake of the
Great Recession of 2009. “What is needed,” Cha-Jua concluded,
“is a political strategy and a social movement that seek to
coordinate and redeploy blacks’ social capital to rebuild,
revitalize, and democratize black civil society.” Joseph agrees:
What Cha-Jua, and Marable before him, diagnosed as the failures of the
first two Reconstructions demands the success of a new one.

Throughout _The Third Reconstruction_, Joseph compares Black Lives
Matter to the civil rights and Black Power movements. Referring to the
protests that swept the nation in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder
by Minneapolis police, Joseph writes: “Black equality as the beating
heart of American democracy proved to be the central message behind
the largest social justice mobilization in American history.” But
what makes Black Lives Matter different, in his estimation, is that by
“shedding the political shortcomings that had plagued the two
earlier periods of Reconstruction,” it was able to “embrac[e] the
full complexity of Black identity.”

Joseph takes pains to honor the Black women and the members of the
LGBTQ community who have been instrumental in today’s social
movements. That Black Lives Matter has done so too, he argues, is one
of its greatest strengths and gives him cause not to despair. We must
not be shackled by the past, he declares, but at the same time, the
past gives us reason to imagine a better future—one defined by a
Reconstruction that has lasting power. “Today, in the midst of
another period of Reconstruction,” Joseph writes, “we have a grave
political and moral choice to make. I choose hope.”

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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Robert Greene II
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professor of history at Claflin University and has written
for _Jacobin_, _In These Times_, and _Dissent_.

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* U.S. history
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* African American history
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* Reconstruction
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* Racism
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* Inequality
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* voting rights
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