'Third Reconstruction' theory says nation still in progress on civil rights

Those blindsided by the 2016 presidential election results -- and there were millions -- needed only to have considered one of our nation's most tumultuous eras, Reconstruction, to understand that the seeds of Donald Trump's unanticipated victory were planted more than 150 years ago.

Born in the aftermath of the bloody Civil War, Reconstruction was America's attempt to make good on its founding promise of civil and political equality. The Reconstruction years of 1865 to 1877 saw newly freed slaves in the South voting and holding office for the first time. The pre-eminent authority on the period, Eric Foner of Columbia University, calls Reconstruction "the nation's first great experiment in biracial democracy."

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To be readmitted to the Union, the defeated Confederate states were required to affirm the Constitution's so-called Reconstruction amendments -- the 13th, 14th, and 15th -- which abolished slavery, established birthright citizenship, ensured equal protection under the law, and guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, color or previous slave status. To safeguard these rights for newly freed African-American citizens, federal troops were dispatched throughout the South.

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"After the Civil War, interracial coalitions -- majority black with progressive whites -- take over the Southern slave states and rewrite Southern constitutions," explained the Rev. William Barber II, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, N.C., president of the North Carolina NAACP and the architect of the nationally acclaimed Moral Mondays movement.

He notes that the rewritten constitution in North Carolina, in addition to codifying the Reconstruction amendments, also mandated public education, stated that men were entitled to enjoy the fruit of their labor, and declared that a "civilized government's first duty was to care for the poor and orphaned."

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It didn't take long for pushback to come, however. The Southern aristocracy appealed to racial fear and resentment as it sought to re-establish the old order. According to Peniel E. Joseph, who holds a joint professorship at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the history department at the University of Texas at Austin, the resistance to black equality during Reconstruction "pivoted" around several factors.

"There was the economic battle over resources whites contended were being diverted away from the working class to blacks, ... and there were policies designed to disenfranchise black voters." Another effort was to incarcerate black men and women as a way to "control black labor through sharecropping and peonage."

According to Barber, author of a 2016 book, The Third Reconstruction, Southerners dubbed their resistance the Redemption Movement -- "to redeem the South from sin, which was black and white working together." He said Southern politicians -- mainly Democrats, at the time the party of white supremacy -- aided and abetted by the Ku Klux Klan, used voter suppression, intimidation, and violence to "sweep" back into power by 1876.

That same year saw Republican Rutherford B. Hayes win the White House through a congressional bargain after a contested presidential election. The deal that made Hayes president -- known as the Compromise of 1877 -- required the removal of federal troops from the South. This formally ended Reconstruction.

"After Reconstruction came deconstruction," Barber said. Throughout the South, state laws were passed stripping African-Americans of their rights. "By 1883, (Southern Democrats) had amassed enough power to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1875."

The U.S. Supreme Court by a vote of 8-1 declared the civil rights law unconstitutional, ushering in the Jim Crow era of legally sanctioned segregation.

Although Reconstruction was short-lived, Foner, the author of Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution, writes that it transformed life for Southern blacks. "It raised their expectations and aspirations ... allowed space for the creation of institutions that enabled them to survive the repression that followed."

That struggle to survive would give rise to the civil rights movement and what many historians dub the Second Reconstruction. This coalition of blacks and progressive whites -- what Barber calls "a fusion movement"-- would springboard from the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that declared the doctrine of "separate but equal" unconstitutional and began the dismantling of Jim Crow. This coalition gave birth to the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Fair Housing Act.

However, as Barber pointed out, "every advance toward a more perfect union has been meet with a backlash of resistance." The "deconstruction" this time was Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in the 1968 presidential election -- the effort to turn the South solidly Republican by appealing to "racial hate and fear without using overt racist language." In 1980, Ronald Reagan would employ the same strategy that was so successful for Nixon.

"That is why Reagan went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964, to kick off his campaign. It was a direct attack against fusion movements," Barber said.

Battered but not defeated, the fusion movement flexed its muscle in 2008, when Barack Obama won Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and the presidency.

"The electorate that elected President Obama showed that the South didn't have to remain solid. ... That was the beginning of the Third Reconstruction," Barber says. Thought leaders such as Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates and NAACP President Cornell Brooks are among those who agree with Barber.

According to Barber the latest "deconstruction" -- which he is confident won't succeed in the long run -- started as soon as Obama took office, with the constant obstruction of a Republican Congress and efforts to de-legitimize his presidency.

"Trump's victory could not have been possible without the election of Barack Obama," Barber said. He said Trump's election strategies followed an all-too-familiar pattern, and the only surprise was the "ease with which he adapted them for the 21st century." However, he reiterated, "we upset the apple cart in 2008."

Joseph echoed Barber's hopeful outlook. "The lessons from Reconstruction that apply today are that historical progress doesn't move forward in a linear fashion. That's something President Obama reminded the nation of again during his (Jan. 10) farewell speech in Chicago."

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Carl Chancellor is a Pulitzer-winning journalist and editorial director at the Center for American Progress.