Page 2 - First Reconstruction News Today

The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (UNC Press 2021) by Van Gosse, Franklin and Marshall College. At a conference this week with nonlegal academic

An Introduction to Class Struggle in the US, 1973-1998

A new congressional resolution asserts it’s not only possible to end poverty, but morally necessary.

SOUDERTON — Along with being involved in specific programs to fight poverty, such as food banks, improved health care or restoring clean water to poor communities, the Poor Peoples Campaign

It’s Time to Fully Address Poverty and Low Wages from the Bottom Up! Drawing on the transformational history of the First Reconstruction following the Civil War and the Second Reconstruction of the civil rights struggles of the 20th century, the Third Reconstruction is a revival of our constitutional commitment to establish justice, provide for the general welfare, end decades of austerity, and recognize that policies that center the 140 million are also good economic policies that can hea...

Our current moment demands action of similarly historic proportions to heal and transform the nation. We need a Third Reconstruction.

ILLUSTRATION BY GEORGE BATES In October 1829, some of the last surviving leaders of America’s founding generation gathered in Richmond, Virginia, for a state constitutional convention. Two issues dominated the gathering: suffrage and apportionment. Virginia’s 1776 constitution, drafted in the crucible of revolution, had limited the vote to white men who owned a certain amount of property. It also drew the General Assembly’s electoral districts to heavily favor the plantation-dominated Tid...

summary It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential back electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swi...

Opinion: Martin Luther King Jr.s legacy demands truth before unity CNN 1/17/2021 Opinion by Peniel E. Joseph © Afro Newspaper/Gado/Archive Photos/Getty Images Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gestures emphatically during a speech at a Chicago Freedom Movement rally in Soldier Field, Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1966. This years holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., happening in the wake of of a White mobs sacking of the US Capitol and an unprecedented second impeachment of ...