The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the 21st Century

University of Texas historian Joseph (The Sword and the Shield) tracks in this impassioned and immersive chronicle America’s “unhappy pattern” of racial progress sparking political backlash from the 1860s to the present day. Contending that the post–Civil War Reconstruction era constituted the country’s “second founding,” Joseph examines how the “moral failure” of Jim Crow set the stage for two more recent periods of intense fighting over racial equality: the Second Reconstruction, comprised of the decades between the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and the Third Reconstruction, which was set in motion by the 2008 election of Barack Obama. According to Joseph, the distance between Obama’s “racial optimism” and the “melancholy reality of Black life” gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and its vision of “radical Black dignity” influenced by Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and others. Amid the incisive historical analysis of battles between “reconstructionists” pushing for a true multiracial democracy and “redemptionists” seeking to “reinscribe slavery’s power relations,” Joseph interweaves moving reflections on his experiences growing up in Jamaica, Queens in the 1980s. The result is an essential reframing of America’s past and present. Photos. (Sept.)