February 2, 2021 | Podcasts ImpactAlpha Editor ImpactAlpha, Feb. 2 – A contested election. A political deal. An historic sellout. Screech… halt… stop. The presidential election just finished had a decidedly different outcome than the previously most fiercely contested election. The outcome of the 1876 election between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes actually was thrown in Congress, which gave the electoral votes of Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina and to Hayes in a deal to withdraw federal troops from their deployments in those states. That signaled the end of Reconstruction, the decade-long experiment in multiracial democracy and inclusive prosperity that spurred small-town vitality and the flourishing of Black businesses and professionals across the South in the decade after the Civil War. The white supremacist backlash that followed ushered in decades of Jim Crow.