Completion said there was really no Church Involvement there. Im not trying to depricate the church. Im asserting it played a central role but i dont want to give a tribute of monopoly of leadership to the church. In both reconstructions, the enthusiasm of white northerners started to wane, to decline when the price of black advancement rose. In the 1870s, we talked about the way in which just the need to police the white south became a price that was greater than what many white northerners were willing to pay, and thats one of the reasons the first reconstruction ended. In more recent times, you find that when the inner city riots of the 60s take place, when the School Bussing issue arrived in the 1970s, when whites start to realize that there is a National Problem here and there is a National Price to be paid, the enthusiasm for whites, or at least the acquiescence of whites in the north starts to decline. Now, i want to draw a distinction here, though, between the two reconstructions. This time the federal withdrawal has been far less complete than it was in the 1870s. And today the south is different in ways some of which well talk about in a few moments and many of which we dont have time to get into, but i would say one of the most important ways in which the south was different is that blacks can vote now. Well talk about why that is. In both reconstructions, racist violence played a crucial role. I dont need to tell you that in the 1870s, violence by the ku klux klan and other white terrorists was crucial in rolling back the gains of the first reconstruction. And we saw in the films that in the Civil Rights Movement, especially by the 1960s, again, you get very extreme, severe white racist violence against blacks and their white allies. But lets point out that the violence was less extensive in the 60s. As horrible as it was, its not allout war. In fact, it was counterproductive to those who wanted to keep things racially the way they had always been. Its the very violence against civil rights demonstrators that furthers their cause. There is a reason, as you know, why the southern christian Leadership Conference, after the stalemate in albany, georgia decided to go to birmingham. They went there, because they were pretty sure that they would get a confrontation there that would dramatize to the world what was at stake. And thats what happened. So there were fewer whites in the 60s who were taking up arms. In the 1860s, it was millions in the confederate army. Fewer in the 1960s by far, to less effect, and in fact, the effect was the opposite of what they wanted. In both reconstructions, northern blacks played an active role, but southern blacks played the decisive role. Why is that . Give me one good reason why the southern blacks are crucial both times . [ inaudible ] theyre invested in the outcome, but even more simple. Rowan. [ inaudible ] so the blacks in the south knew the way things worked on the ground. They knew what they were up against. Yes, because the south is where black people lived. In the 1860s, almost all africanamericans lived in the south, probably 95 of the population of blacks lived in the south, and even in the 1960s, a majority of blacks still lived in the south, a slight majority. But of course its going to be the southern blacks who play a decisive role because thats where the struggle is being carried out and thats where they live, many of them. Okay. In both reconstructions, and this is more of a sideline but its fairly interesting. In both reconstructions you see that the diversity within the black community emerges in, if anything, a more vivid way and people outside the black community become aware of that. We talked about how, in South Carolina, for example, in the first reconstruction there were differences between the urban mixed race freed before the civil war population of africanamericans and those nearly freed blacks in the plantation district. The latter wanting radical land reform and the former not being particularly interested in that. So there is just one kind of diversity within the Africanamerican Community that emerged in the first reconstruction. In the second, we see it all the time. We see the tensions between the southern christian Leadership Conference on the one hand and smic on the other, which becomes more acute over time. We see differences between the northern black community and the Southern Black Community in the 1960s. You heard john lewis who led the salma to montgomery march talking about the emergence of malcolm x as a National Figure and how black folk like john lewis who had grown up in the south and the Christian Church really didnt know what to make of malcolm x. So in both of these instances, you really see what was always out there, which is that the black community in this country is a diverse one. In both reconstructions, the crucial demands were for equality and access. I talked about the fact that i liked the word access better than the word inclusion because to me inclusion has a little bit of a ring of wanting to get into the other fellows game. Whereas access somehow feels more neutral to me. Its about the idea that if, as a society that has institutions that has a government thats supposed to be for the people, that everybody ought to have the same access to those. In both reconstructions, and i have to be a little bit careful here. The first reconstruction, if we talk about that portion of it which is the civil war, the first part of reconstruction, you get a real measure of black political power. Up through the end of radical reconstruction, blacks have political power that they never had before. And then again, in the second reconstruction, one of the fruits of the movement was intended to be and was indeed that blacks in the south won the right to vote on a basis of equality. A measure of political power. Now, we need to add, we need to hasten to add that in both cases, the power that blacks obtained was in the political system. It was still dominated by whites, at least on the National Level and on the state level. On the local level, its a little different. There are many localities which were dominated by blacks in the first radical reconstruction, and there are many localities in the United States now, especially in the deep south, where you have a black majority, black officeholding and so forth. The bad news is these places tend to be i mpoverished places a place where you may have political power but the monetary resources to make a difference are not abundant. In both instances, the first and the second reconstruction, blacks ended up tied almost exclusively to a single political party. First time around it was the Republican Party. The Second Time Around its the Democratic Party. And there are those who argue that this is disadvantageous. I had a black colleague at yale who once said, as many have, that black america would be better off today if there were more black republicans, because then the two parties would compete for the black vote by speaking to black interests. He said, we would be better off if there were more black republicans. The problem is that most of us dont want to be republicans, including me, he said. So im quoting him. So there you have it. After both reconstructions, severe economic inequities remained. Most of the black population after the first reconstruction remained for rural agricultural labors. Today the picture is better, but its still a case that onethird of the africanamerican population is mired in deep poverty. There was more of an attempt to address that in the 1960s, but we havent made a lot of headway. I made the argument in the beginning that the gains of a second reconstruction have proved more lasting this time. I mean, after all, if we say were talking about the 50s and 60s, the High Water Mark of the Civil Movement, how many years have passed since then . About 50 years. And after 50 years, there have been no rolling back of example of the rights of blacks to vote. If anything, blacks have more influence to vote than theyve ever had, so if were going to have a retreat from reconstruction, its taken an awful long time to happen in any decisive kind of way. Why is that . Well, its hard to answer definitively, but prejudice against blacks was less in grained at the beginning of the second reconstruction as it was the beginning of the first. Thats an answer, but it also raises another question. Why . Why is white prejudice, as bad as it may have been, less intense in the 1950s and 1960s than it was a hundred years ago . The only quick answer i can give is that all the trends and sciences and social sciences in the 20th century, certainly the mid20th century, were toward a repudiation of racism. That sounds like an axiom to you, but we mentioned in the latter 19th century, people who claimed to be scientists and social scientists, were saying there were racial differences, inferior races inherently. That was something a respectable person could say in a room like this and not be laughed out of the place. By 1950, you would be very hardput to find an academic person who would make that argument. Very hardput indeed. Another thing that had happened, which you mentioned already, by the 1950s is that a lot of blacks had moved to places where they could vote. The great migration to the northern cities. And the fact that blacks could vote up there meant that in parts of the north, white politicians had to listen to black people. And that proved helpful when it came time to vote on civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Another reason that the gains have lasted this time better than last time, i would argue, is because president Lyndon Johnson was so politically skillful in this realm. In the realm of Foreign Policy, he didnt have a clue, unfortunately, in many respects. But domestically, he had the vision to come up with a system that would come as close as humanly possible to being selfperpetua selfperpetuating. What he understood was that the vote was going to be key. We talked about this. That if you want to change the south, if you want to change the country, youve got to ensure that black people have the right to vote. The only way to do that is by federalizing voter registration, and he did that. He also figured out that if black people have the right to vote, its going to become politically more difficult to take their rights away. The right to vote is a selfperpetuating right to a certain extent. Because you have the right to vote, politicians are going to be more hesitant to try to take it away from you. It doesnt mean theyll never try. It just means your right to vote is an impediment to being denied the right to vote. That sounds silly when you hear it spoken, but its true. I have more to say about that in a minute. Another thing that was different in the second reconstruction is the world context. First of all, the fact there really was a world context. Second, that the cold war was going on in which the United States and the soviet union were competing for influence in the world. The United Nations had been created. As i mentioned to you before, i think, the General Assembly of the United Nations is a body in which every country is represented. And with the breakup of the sn war ii, you end up with dozens of countries represented in the u. N. That are places where people of color live. So it became less and less tenable for a president of the United States to try to get anything accomplished on the world stage or in the United Nations and have to explain why black people cant eat in a restaurant in the d. C. Suburbs. Its just too awkward. So thats a difference. The emergence of visual media. There were news media in the first reconstruction, the newspapers. But i think you would agree having looked at the films that we saw in this class that there is nothing like seeing film of a building burning down or someone being beaten up or police dogs jumping on women or children or people being beaten by fire hoses, the fact that that existed in the 1950s and 60s augmented these other forces im talking about. Lets not forget the factor of black education. Black americans in 1865 knew what they wanted and needed. They were just as smart then as they were in 1965, but they had been systemically deprived in most parts of the country of an education. By the 1950s, youve got almost a century of black education thats taken place, and education education equips things, all sorts of things, including trying to change their place in society. You remember we talked about this great irony of segregation. Whites in the south had this brilliant idea that what they needed to do was to segregate blacks in every aspect of life. Separate them off, push them off into the corner. One of the results of separation and neglect was a measure of black autonomy. If you have a black school with a black principal and black faculty, even if the resources arent what they should be, and white people arent so much paying attention to whats going on there, because they dont really care, you have the ability in that school to teach all kinds of things that ultimately are going to become useful in the fight for equality. In a way that you wouldnt if white people were running everything. So there is a way in which the s segregators dug their own grave. Remember the busboy cut. A professor ran off those fires calling for the boycott on the Alabama State conference. The Civil Movement was conducted by College Students emanating from black colleges all across the south. So the segregators had created the infrastructure that black folk would use to attack segregation. Now, im talking about the lasting gains of the second reconstruction. Let me issue a few caveats. In the first place, i have to preface this by saying i dont mean any of this in a partisan way. Im going to be talking about republicans and democrats, and im going to be talking about different political figures. Im not trying to cast aspersions on anybody. You can like who you want, im just trying to talk about fact. Johnson, president johnson, when he commanded his Justice Department to draw up the Voting Rights act, or actually, when the Civil Rights Act of 64 was being drafted, he said, we passpass this, we democrats lose the white south through my lifetime and yours. It didnt happen quite as quickly as he said, but it pretty much has happened because the deep south is now pretty solidly republican. The deep south. But this part of the south, for example, virginia, not so much. Virginia voted for obama twice, for example. Texas, which is sort of southern and sort of not, but there are those who say that within 15 or 20 years, texas is going to be a solidly Democratic State because of immigration from mexico. I dont know whether thats right or wrong. But in the short term, we have a predominantly republican south just as johnson said, and you may think thats good, you may think its bad, but its a fact. We still have, as i mentioned, the deep poverty of onethird of the black population and a small percentage of the white population and other populations as well. But there is an intractable problem of poverty that we havent figured out a solution for. We have continued defacto segregation. There is a way in which this society is still a segregated society. Name one, one realm that is still largely segregated. [ inaudible ] housing and neighborhoods. Dixon . Religion . Religious life in this country still largely segregated. Whether you think this is a good thing or bad thing is interesting, because most africanamericans go to predominantly africanamerican churches and i suspect arent particularly interested in integrating because they dont see anything on the other side thats better than what theyve already got, but yes, religious life is quite segregated. Neighborhoods. Caroline . Now, schools legally are desegregated. And there are many parts of the country where there is a lot of integration. My own children went to schools that were thoroughly integrated, but there are many entire School Systems, such as the one that my wife grew up in, that are defacto, almost completely segregated because no white folk lived there in that jurisdiction. And that brings me to the realm of localities, local government. The way this country is set up is that a lot of the daytoday running of life takes place on the local level. And schools are a great example. Schools are run on the local level. So if you live in a jurisdiction where everybody is basically the same race, youre not going to get integration. Virginia is an extreme example of that because the socalled cities arent even part of the counties. Youve got cities in this state that only have a few thousand people in them, but they are separa separate. Some of them have combined School Systems with the county, some of them dont. So in the city of richmond, for example, the city of richmond has a School System that is impoverished, whereas the suburban counties have systems that are more or less flush with money. And according to the Supreme Court, there is no way to remedy that. So in many ways, were still in a seg reregated society, but in many ways not. When i was your age, this college had just started to let nonwhite students to enroll, and here we are in a more integrated environment. So, again, im arguing that the change is the second reconstruction have been more permanent, i just dont want to sound like im blindly optimistic and i dont still see the problems that are out there. One more caveat, if i may, and that is were not sure where the Supreme Court is going. I was literally walking out of my office