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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 Tidewater region in eastern Virginia, at the expense of the now-burgeoning western counties. Presiding ...

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 swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the f...

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 year's holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., happening in the wake of of a White mob's sacking of the US Capitol and an unprecedented second impeachment of President Donald J. Trump, offers the United States a chance to recover and connect with the most...