Racial Terror and the Second Repeal of Reconstruction

Kearston Farr comforts her daughter, Taliyah, outside the Charleston, South Carolina, church where Dylann Roof killed nine people. Joe Raedle/Getty

How the legacy of Jim Crow haunts Trump’s America

By Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, newrepublic.com

This April, PBS aired a groundbreaking documentary series on the fate of Reconstruction—and therefore of Black America. Featuring more than 40 scholars (myself among them) and Black descendants of key figures in Reconstruction’s history, this copiously researched chronicle also doubles as a powerful and chilling window on to our own age of violent and resurgent white nationalism. With nuanced commentaries about the rise and fall of Reconstruction, the series revealed how African Americans—in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois—emerged from bondage, and stood briefly in the sun before being returned to the unyielding weight of white supremacy.

The repudiation of Reconstruction’s initial promise was launched in shockingly brutal fashion, via a burgeoning series of massacres and lynchings, carried out by white vigilantes and law enforcement officials alike against Black people. As Southern Redeemers worked to put down burgeoning alliances between Blacks and whites—a coalition that foreshadowed precisely the class-based politics now rhetorically championed by left and liberal critics of “identity politics”—Black bodies served as the scapegoats; their ritual sacrifice permitted postbellum whites to reunite across class and region.

This vicious scourge of lynchings and mass killings was perhaps the decisive factor in reducing Black representation to nothing by the early part of the twentieth century. It’s important to note, though, that like all concerted denials of Black civil and political rights, this campaign was not inevitable. Had the Supreme Court not hamstrung the federal government from protecting its citizens from massive violence, effectively nullifying the transformative possibilities of the Civil War, the white supremacist hold on national politics might have given way to a far more robust vision of democratic pluralism. But radical Republicans lacked the raw political power to triumph over an ideology of white supremacy that shaped the foundations of our federal Constitution.
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