A female welder. Circa 1930s–1940s. (Corbis / Getty)

Books & the Arts / June 12, 2024

A Sweeping History of the Black Working Class

By focusing on the Black working class and its long history, Blair LM Kelley’s book, Black Folk, helps tell the larger story of American democracy over the past two and a half centuries.

Robert Greene II

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The famous “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably the best-known public statement by Martin Luther King Jr., was given at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In it, King urged the nation on in tackling segregation and political inequality, but he also talked about economic injustice: How, he asked, could Black Americans continue to live “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”? 

King was not alone in highlighting the economic disparities ravaging Black America on that day. The March on Washington, after all, was about jobs as well as freedom, and one of the themes that connected the plethora of speeches given by the leaders of the burgeoning civil rights movement was a concern about economic inequality and the desire to realize freedom in all the domains of life—not just politics and civil society. “Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practice Act,” thundered A. Philip Randolph, “but what good will it do if profit-­geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers black and white?” 

A socialist, Randolph always thought deeply about the relationship between race, labor, and class in American society. This—as well as how they relate to gender—sits at the heart of Blair LM Kelley’s book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class. In this masterful analysis of US history, Kelley offers a new and refreshing perspective: While focused on the history of the Black working class in particular, she at the same time captures truths about the American past writ large: How the racialization of minority groups is intertwined with class; how capitalism extracts profits from labor; how the politics of race and class can clash within Black America; and even how the latest outbreak of the culture wars in the United States—over how to teach American history—is a dire threat to understanding this rich and variegated legacy. By focusing on the Black working class and its long history, Kelly helps tell the larger story of American democracy over the past two and a half centuries.

Kelley, who is currently the director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, has focused on Black and Southern history throughout her career. Her first book, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship, discussed how the tactic of boycotting public transportation by Black Americans did not begin in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead, Kelley showed, the first campaigns started with streetcars in the 1890s and early 1900s and led to the Supreme Court taking up the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. 

Like Right to Ride, Black Folk offers a unique take on a familiar history, in part because it includes the personal narratives of members of Kelley’s own family tree. Beginning with a chapter on an enslaved ancestor named Henry, a blacksmith, she then tells us about her great-grandfather, Solicitor Duncan, and her grandfather, John Dee. Through their stories, Kelley personalizes the history of three generations of Black working-class men as they went from slavery and sharecropping in the Deep South to trying to make a living in World War II–era Philadelphia. From Reconstruction to Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the Depression and New Deal era, Kelley details what remained continuous within Black working-­class history and what did not.

Black history, Kelley notes, has not always been told as a story of the working class, but by doing so she reminds us of the centrality of labor to all of Black history. Charting the transition from slavery to freedom at the end of the Civil War and the formation of new labor regimes during the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and New Deal periods, she also examines the ways in which the freedom to choose how and where one works was a central concern for Black Americans. While we tend to emphasize, in histories of the Reconstruction era, the political and social travails involved in extending voting rights to Black men, as well as the rise of Black politicians and the violent counterrevolution of the 1870s, Kelley also stresses that, on the ground across the South, the freedom most dear to Black Americans was the freedom to choose how to live their new lives—and that included how to make a living, too.  

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To understand Black religion, politics, and cultural creativity in the Reconstruction era, Kelley notes, one has to understand this struggle to find dignity and create the foundations of emancipation as one that was often centered on the labor Black Americans performed. No longer forced to work as slave labor for someone else, they now had to decide who they would work for—and how. That so many Black Americans saw their struggle for this more expansive understanding of freedom weakened—though not destroyed—by the rise of sharecropping helps explains why it remained such a defining issue for members of the Black working class. 

As Kelley shows, Black working-class organizers and agitators, from railroad workers to those organizing within the US Postal Service, were on the front lines, pursuing not just higher wages or better working conditions but also civil rights reform. The rise of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters as an engine of social change is one of Kelley’s key examples. Formed by A. Philip Randolph in 1925, the union soon became a critical part of the Black struggle for civil and political rights in the 20th century, serving not only as the labor organization for railroad-car porters—one of the few decent-­paying jobs available to Black men in the early to mid-20th century—but also a conduit connecting Black Americans north and south, east and west, via America’s rail lines to advance a general program of emancipation and racial equality. 

Not all of Black America agreed with the union’s radical bent. Kelley describes attempts by The Chicago Defender, the famed Black-run newspaper that spurred many Black Americans to join the Great Migration north, to weaken the brotherhood due to the paper’s skepticism toward labor organizing. Randolph and the working-class members of the brotherhood, however, could give as well as they got: Randolph would sometimes refer acidly to the Defender as “the Surrender.”

Alongside Kelley’s discussions of work, she also offers a careful reading of the important role that gender plays in the history of the Black working class. Telling the story of washerwomen like Sarah during the Great Depression, she puts Black women at the center of her history and, in this way, joins the illustrious company of historians like Tera Hunter, the author of To ’Joy My Freedom, who wrote about Black women’s lives in the Deep South in the post-Reconstruction era and offered a study of how race, gender, and labor intersected in ways that many Americans have never learned about. 

Hunter was interested in how Black working-class women—often erased from the broader narratives of gender and labor in American history—found ways to organize in order to create an economic and social space in which they could survive and even thrive. Expanding on Hunter’s work, Kelley examines how Black working-class women, from Rosa Parks to Fannie Lou Hamer, not only sought to transform their workplaces but also became an integral part—if not sometimes the integral part—of the larger struggles of Black Americans during the civil rights era. 

Connecting the struggle of working-class women to the history of those struggling for Black freedom, Kelley also makes it clear that it was often not the “talented tenth” of Black middle-class intellectuals and activists who helped break the grip of segregation over the South, but rather working-class Black Americans. The reader of Black Folk can only be humbled by the hard work of washer­women in the South in the late 19th century—and domestic servants throughout the country in the 20th century—in their efforts to secure their own economic rights in spite of tremendous pressure not to do so. And that reader will also begin to see how these working-class actions established a pattern for the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s. The working-class women that Kelley chronicles in this book did more than just make “space for their families,” she explains; they also pursued a political struggle “for their rights, for their dignity, and for one another.”

Such working-class solidarity repeatedly showed itself throughout the second half of the 20th century. When Randolph and King led the call for a Freedom Budget in 1966 to address the plight of the poor, they sought a solution that would benefit not just Black Americans but all members of the working class, regardless of race. “The tragedy,” Randolph wrote in his introduction to the budget, “is that groups only one generation removed from poverty themselves, haunted by the memory of scarcity and fearful of slipping back, step on the fingers of those struggling up the ladder.” Randolph acknowledged that many in the working class—especially, but not only, the Black working class—knew that they were one financial disaster away from being poor themselves. 

As Kelley points out in her conclusion, what these activists had long recognized was that the plight of the Black working class was often shared by the working class as a whole. This simple truth was made plain during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and Donald Trump’s administration. Yet, as Kelley also notes in the final pages of her book: “The Trump-caused obsession with the white working class…has obscured the reality that the most active, most engaged, most informed, and most impassioned working class in America is the Black working class.” It is this element of the American body politic that has, in the past, tended to offer the most hope in trying times. As the son of Black working-class people, I can say that this is true today too.

When it comes to understanding modern politics, analogies abound. We have the 1938 Munich conference as a metaphor for the perils of being “weak” on foreign policy. Modern hyper-partisanship has driven comparisons to the 1850s and the lead-up to the Civil War. With the combination of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and a new wave of strikes roiling the nation, scholars and journalists have compared our current moment to the 1918 influenza pandemic and the following year’s Red Summer, when the United States appeared to be on fire with strikes and protests from coast to coast.1

One of the most potent analogies has been that of Reconstruction. The term was coined during the Civil War to describe the plan to readmit the secessionist states and push the South to transition to a post-slavery economy. It took on a new life in the 1950s and ’60s, when civil rights activists and observers began to refer to a “Second Reconstruction.” For them, the first had been an incomplete revolution: Black men gained the right to vote and Black people in general became—however fitfully—part of the American body politic, but these gains were soon dismantled by white Southern violence and political intimidation and white Northern indifference. The radicals of the 1950s and ’60s set out to try again, hoping to both expand and finish the job of the first Reconstruction 100 years later. In his famous speech in Montgomery, Ala., celebrating the culmination of the Selma to Montgomery marches and the 1965 voting rights campaign, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. laid out the case for the importance of the first Reconstruction and the urgent need for a second one. Describing the end of Reconstruction as a “travesty of justice,” King stated in defiance of Southern segregationists that “we are on the move now.”2

Much was achieved during this Second Reconstruction, but like the first it remained unfinished. The economic disparities between Black and white Americans continued to be a major problem. Meanwhile, an ascendant right challenged the victories of the civil rights movement, even as legal segregation was destroyed. As C. Vann Woodward, the eminent historian of the South, presciently noted in a 1965 essay in Harper’s, there would likely come a time when the American polis would recognize the need for a Third Reconstruction. Woodward revised and republished the Harper’s piece in a book of essays, The Burden of Southern History, in 1968. “It may be that in due course,” Woodward wrote, “say on the eve of the Third Reconstruction, some enterprising historian will bring out a monograph on the Compromise that ended the Second Reconstruction, entitled perhaps The Triumph of Tokenism.”3

Woodward’s premonition comes to mind when reading Peniel Joseph’s new book, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. A scholar of the Black Power movement, Joseph turns his attention here to Black America’s plight since the beginning of the 1980s. For Joseph, not to mention many others, the need to reckon with the history of the last 40 years is paramount if we are to finally complete the work of Reconstruction. Inspired by the events of Barack Obama’s presidency, the rise of Black Lives Matter in the 2010s, the crises of Covid and the January 6 insurrection, and his own early life experiences, Joseph offers a book that seeks to understand the post–civil rights history of Black America.4

The origins of his career as a historian, Joseph tells us, can be found in the classrooms of New York City in the 1980s and in his home, growing up with a mother of Haitian descent. He could not understand how life could be so difficult for the young men and women who looked like him when, at the same time, the teachers at his Catholic school were telling him and the other students of the greatness of America during and after the civil rights movement. “I began to notice this gap in our perceptions,” Joseph writes, explaining in a short but powerful statement what it means to be Black in America. The promise of the civil rights and Black Power era remained unfulfilled, and so Black Americans—and the rest of the country—needed to renew the struggle to secure what the Reconstructions of the past had tried but failed to achieve.5

oseph has spent much of his career pushing Americans to reexamine what they think they know about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Currently, he serves in several roles at the University of Texas at Austin: as the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values; as an associate dean for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion; and as the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His first book, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, was a landmark text that tied together the resurgence of Black nationalism in the 1950s and the rise of the Nation of Islam in the early 1960s, the Black Panthers in the late ’60s, and the Pan-Africanists in the 1970s.6

Since then, Joseph has written about such figures as Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) in Stokely: A Life and argued against accounts that posit a simplistic and ideologically hostile relationship between MLK and Malcolm X in The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. In his 2010 work Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, Joseph explored how the post–Voting Rights Act era became a radical moment of political, cultural, and intellectual debate among Black Americans.7

Now, in The Third Reconstruction, Joseph extends his work on Black Power and Black life in post–World War II America to the present by insisting that a clear understanding of the 1980s and ’90s is necessary to grasp the current social movements for freedom in America. In many ways, The Third Reconstruction expands and develops the arguments found in Manning Marable’s Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America. Revised several times, with its subtitle changing to reflect the updates, Marable’s book tracks the growing frustration with the achievements of the civil rights movement among a new generation of Black scholars and activists. The first edition was released in 1984, the second in 1991. By 2007, when the third (and final) edition was published, Marable had had time to reflect on how much his own thinking had changed in the past 25 years. In the book’s first edition, he argued that by 1982, the civil rights gains of the ’60s and ’70s were under threat from “the triumph of Reaganism.” In a revised chapter for the 1991 edition, Marable argued that “in many respects the state of American race relations reached a new nadir in the late 1980s and early 1990s.” By the 21st century, he was offering an even grimmer view: After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he could see that his earlier assessments had not fully appreciated how much work was still needed to fix the United States. “The awful specter of black bodies floating in New Orleans,” he wrote, “of hundreds of thousands being dispersed throughout the country and being denied constructive federal aid, underscored just how enduring the great racial and class divides are within the fabric and logic of American institutions of power.”8

In many ways, Joseph picks up where Marable left off. Reflecting on the difficulty of the historical parallels he hopes to draw in The Third Reconstruction, he agrees with Marable that the two earlier Reconstructions did not go far enough. While the country’s problems in the 1970s and ’80s weren’t the same as those in the 1870s, Joseph does note some troubling parallels. In the 1860s and ’70s, the brief hopeful period of Reconstruction was overwhelmed by the long era of Redemption and then by Jim Crow segregation, while in the 1960s and ’70s, the country saw the destruction of most Black radical political organizations, the assassination of numerous Black leaders, and a broader right-wing attack on the achievements of the civil rights and Black Power movements. Figures like Julian Bond, an activist turned Democratic Party politician in Georgia, repeatedly lamented the erosion of these gains in the late 1970s and the ’80s, especially during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. In 1982, Bond argued against Reagan’s attempt to weaken the Voting Rights Act that year, saying: “If the president prevails, voting rights will perish, and black Americans will be a voteless—and a hopeless—people once again.”9

Joseph experienced firsthand the on-the-ground stakes of this reality. Coming of age during the Reagan era, he grew up in a New York City that was defined by Reagan’s conservatism on race and the welfare state, along with an expanding War on Drugs. For Joseph, Barack Obama’s election in 2008 represented the promise of “a new vision of US citizenship,” one that would live up to the nation’s greatest statements on freedom and democracy. Instead, Joseph argues, Trump’s election after the Obama era became a reminder that “white backlash contains multitudes.” But the Obama years also ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement, which continued the long Black radical tradition of keeping America honest about its many issues with race and democracy.10

ne of the strengths of The Third Reconstruction is how carefully Joseph captures the history that was taking place during his adolescence. He spares no one among the country’s political leaders, criticizing Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for their inability to escape the neo-Redemptionist ideas inherent in the “law and order” rhetoric popularized by Richard Nixon in the late 1960s. The frustrations with Carter in the late 1970s among Black leaders and lay citizens alike, Joseph notes, were early warnings about the lack of progress for Black Americans after the civil rights era. Clinton, of course, proved far worse: He used his own brand of law-and-order politics, crafted by the Democratic Leadership Council and the party’s moderate wing, to propel the Democrats back into the White House after 12 years in the political wilderness. “A bipartisan consensus forged in the maelstrom of America’s Second Reconstruction,” Joseph writes, “substituted racially charged symbols—of crime, drug addiction, welfare, public schools, the King holiday—over dismantling structural racism.”11

For Joseph, all of this appeared to be changing with Obama’s election, given how much he had spoken of the need to take action on the long-festering issues of racial inequality. But very quickly, Joseph notes, Obama’s vision of hope began to collide with political realities: His call for “national unity became entangled with the cords of America’s racial past, which hindered its fulfillment in both new and tragically familiar ways.” Obama needed to take bold and decisive action to address the nation’s political, social, and cultural wounds, and yet he did the exact opposite. The actions needed to remake the United States into a true democracy would be difficult, and Obama proved unwilling to embrace the conflict that would come with it. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement marked a growing frustration with Obama, but as Joseph observes, the few gains that were won during the Obama years also created a space for the rise of a white nationalism that found its voice in Donald Trump. “Seeking to redeem America from the scourge of Black equality,” Joseph writes, “Trump and his supporters looked less to Nixon than to the Reconstruction-era South Carolina demagogue Ben Tillman and his violent supporters.”12

Joseph compares Trump’s neo-Redemptionist rise with that of Tillman, who became South Carolina’s governor and later senator. Working as part of the “Red Shirts” in the 1870s, Tillman led the white supremacist violence that disrupted and ultimately destroyed Black political power in the state for generations. As South Carolina’s governor in the 1890s, he spearheaded the effort to draft a new state constitution that would end Black voting rights without technically violating the language of the new 14th and 15th amendments to the US Constitution. The 1895 state Constitution would do just that, replacing the more progressive 1868 Constitution adopted during Reconstruction. In a speech on the floor of the US Senate in 1900, Tillman boasted that this suppression of Black votes was his goal: “Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took up the matter calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disenfranchising as many of them as we could under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.”13

Trump did not seek to completely dismantle Black voting rights, nor was he as successful at achieving the frightening rollback of basic freedoms that Tillman and his followers sought. But he did “normalize white supremacy in contemporary American politics,” Joseph notes, through his lukewarm response to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where one person was killed and dozens more injured in a car attack on the anti-racist counterprotesters, as well as through his utilization of the kind of white supremacist rhetoric once consigned to the margins of the far right.14

Placing Trump in the tradition of Tillman, as well as the massacre in Hamburg, S.C., in 1876 and the Wilmington Coup of 1898, makes clear how dangerous he is not just to Black Americans but to the basic ideas of democracy, self-determination, and civil and political rights. But that means we should also reconsider whether this is indeed a Third Reconstruction or, potentially, another reversal in the struggle for Black freedom and equality. In 2010, The Black Scholar published “The New Nadir: The Contemporary Black Racial Formation,” by the historian Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, in which he argued that despite the election of the nation’s first Black president, the material conditions of Black Americans had only gotten worse in the wake of the Great Recession of 2009. “What is needed,” Cha-Jua concluded, “is a political strategy and a social movement that seek to coordinate and redeploy blacks’ social capital to rebuild, revitalize, and democratize black civil society.” Joseph agrees: What Cha-Jua, and Marable before him, diagnosed as the failures of the first two Reconstructions demands the success of a new one.15

hroughout The Third Reconstruction, Joseph compares Black Lives Matter to the civil rights and Black Power movements. Referring to the protests that swept the nation in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, Joseph writes: “Black equality as the beating heart of American democracy proved to be the central message behind the largest social justice mobilization in American history.” But what makes Black Lives Matter different, in his estimation, is that by “shedding the political shortcomings that had plagued the two earlier periods of Reconstruction,” it was able to “embrac[e] the full complexity of Black identity.”16

Joseph takes pains to honor the Black women and the members of the LGBTQ community who have been instrumental in today’s social movements. That Black Lives Matter has done so too, he argues, is one of its greatest strengths and gives him cause not to despair. We must not be shackled by the past, he declares, but at the same time, the past gives us reason to imagine a better future—one defined by a Reconstruction that has lasting power. “Today, in the midst of another period of Reconstruction,” Joseph writes, “we have a grave political and moral choice to make. I choose hope.”17

In a 1971 issue of Ebony magazine dedicated to exploring “The South Today,” its publisher, John H. Johnson, wrote: “Long before there was a United States of America, there was a Southland.” For many in his generation who had participated in the civil rights movement, the South was a zone of both oppression and liberation—it was the country they knew even if they lived in the North. For many Black Americans, the South was an ancestral home as well as a place of present warning and future promise. It was where the historic struggles against inequality and discrimination had taken place, but it was also a region that had cast an ominous shadow over the rest of the country.

The different Souths that many Black Americans carry with them is the central theme of a new book by Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. With it, Perry enters a long tradition of considering Southern identity—the South of Black freedom and of Black oppression. What it means to be Black in the South, Perry shows, is not just a question of being Black in the South; it is also a question of what it means to be Black in the United States—to be Black in a nation whose traditional narrative of itself shifts the blame for racism, white supremacy, and segregation onto one region instead of confronting the ways in which these maladies were and still are national. But Perry goes even further in her book: One cannot understand Black life in America, she maintains, without understanding the South, but one also cannot understand all of American life without it.

outh to America crisscrosses genres in much the same way that Perry crisscrossed the South while she was working on it. The Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Perry has built a career out of writing books that escape easy categorization as one genre or another. Her works are radical combinations of history, African American studies, Southern studies, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and cultural studies. They also have something in common throughout: a centering of the Black experience and, as a result, of the Southern experience that helped shape Black experience. But here Perry makes the South her primary focus, joining a growing number of Black writers—including Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Zandria Robinson—who have forced us to reconsider what the South means in present-day America while also reevaluating what we thought we knew about the South of the past.

At the heart of Perry’s book is this basic truth: The American South is not a monolith. Nor, she takes great pains to explain, are Black Americans. Yet both the South and Black America have too often been painted with a single brush. Perry, however, won’t let her readers make that mistake. South to America is broken down by regions, with each area of the Black South given its own nuance, subtlety, and particular understanding.

South to America begins in Appalachia. As a region, Appalachia is traditionally ignored in narratives of Southern Black history. Yet Perry’s story of a Black and Southern Appalachia makes perfect sense. Beginning with the Harpers Ferry raid of 1859, she focuses her narrative on a man named Shields Green, one of several Black Americans present at the raid and executed by the state of Virginia in its aftermath. Harpers Ferry was a turning point in American history, but also, Perry reminds us, in Southern history. “Harpers Ferry is a monument to the defeated,” she writes—to the Southern way of life, but also to a more radical vision of emancipation. At Harpers Ferry, “the defeated are wild-eyed radical abolitionist John Brown and his companions, and not the Confederate dead.”

From Appalachia, Perry moves to Louisville, Ky., and Washington, D.C. These early chapters offer rich stories and details about Black life in states like Maryland, Alabama, and North Carolina—stories and details often ignored in “traditional” narratives about Southern Black life. But it is in her chapter on Atlanta, appropriately titled “King of the South,” that Perry offers perhaps her most compelling and complex portrait of Southern Black life. There we find not only problems of racial discrimination but also class and political differences within the city’s Black community. The giants of civil rights activism from Atlanta are well-known: Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Andrew Young, and Hosea Williams are among the champions of freedom who resided in Atlanta. To leave the story at that, however, would be a mistake, as the city witnessed impassioned debates among Black Americans about civil-rights-era tactics. After the 1960s, Atlanta’s Black activist and political classes clashed over the best method of consolidating Black political and economic power. Atlanta, she observes, has a way of “sucking in features from here, there and everywhere of the South, repackaging it, and selling it to the world,” and this has led to it being described as a real-life Wakanda. Yet this Wakanda is only for some and not all Black Atlantans, as the city is also deeply divided by class.

In Perry’s telling, the first great act of “repackaging” for Atlanta came in the aftermath of the Civil War. Ravaged by Gen. William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea, Atlanta experienced a rebirth that took off in the Reconstruction years and crested with the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition. There, Booker T. Washington gave his famous—for some Black Americans, infamous—”Atlanta Compromise” speech. That speech was Washington’s way of announcing, after the death of Frederick Douglass the same year, that he was now the leading figure in Black America. Despite the protests of intellectuals such as Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois, Washington’s argument that Black and white Southerners needed to accept some forms of inequality caught fire at the exposition. “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly,” Washington told his segregated audience, “and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”

But Atlanta was not just the site of Washington’s vision of an unequal South. It was also where Du Bois and other Black radicals posited more egalitarian visions. The 1899 lynching and mutilation of Sam Hose in Coweta County, Ga., just south of Atlanta, was one such incident. It horrified Du Bois, then a professor at Atlanta University, and transformed his sense of the urgency of the Southern struggle. When he was informed that, after Hose’s murder, his knuckles had been put on display for sale, Du Bois was sickened and became newly determined in his fight against segregation in the South. The Atlanta Race Riot, which followed in 1906 and killed dozens of Black Americans, only reinforced Du Bois’s belief that political and social resistance was the only viable way to save the South from white segregationists—and by doing so, to save the United States.

Du Bois insisted, in The Souls of Black Folk, that although Atlanta was the site of barbaric lynchings and massacres, it could also be a center for Black resilience and leadership. Through its cultural institutions, especially its universities, Black Americans would be able to uplift one another and the South as a whole: not by making more money and going into business but by resurrecting the true spirit of American democracy that had briefly flowered during the Reconstruction period. “The true college,” as Du Bois wrote, “will ever have one goal—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”

For Du Bois, the city of Atlanta would serve as an intellectual cauldron for Black freedom because of its great institutions of learning: Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) as well as Morehouse College and Spelman College. But Perry reminds her readers that Atlanta also had a culture apart from its universities and its committed civil rights activists—a culture dedicated to making a way for Black Americans in a society polarized by extreme wealth and inequality. “Behind Atlanta’s shine,” Perry notes, “whether we are talking about social media, the spectacles of pop culture, elegant fine dining, global corporations, or icy diamonds dripping from necks, there are myriad stories and relationships” of a divided Atlanta too.

erry’s chapter on the Black Belt offers a similarly complex portrait. The Black Belt, she writes, had “the blackest soil and the Whitest people. The Blackest people and the whitest cotton.” For her, it represents the clearest distillation of the brutality and promise of the South in American history. Members of the Communist Party of the USA made a similar argument back in the 1930s. For Harry Haywood and other communists, the Black Belt and its inhabitants represented a “nation within a nation” ready to serve as a vanguard for both a communist revolution against capitalism in America and a Black nationalist revolution against white supremacy in the South. Haywood and other Black communists from the era, including Richard Wright, insisted that for this reason the Black Belt was the key to an emancipated Black America. If it could be liberated from the ravages of poverty and white supremacy, then so could the rest of the country.

And yet this vision was doomed to fail. The tragedy—or, more accurately, one of the many tragedies—of Southern history is the unfulfilled promise of Black land ownership in the South. In the Black Belt, Black Americans sought to hold on to political and economic independence via the land. They wanted not only to revitalize the region’s agricultural economy but to find ways to escape its burgeoning industrial economy through smallholder farming. But thanks to the failures of Reconstruction and the emergence of sharecropping, and then the devastation wrought by the boll weevil in the early 20th century and the fortification of the Jim Crow system, this did not happen. What emerged instead was a hardening of the sharecropping system and a lack of social mobility for Black Americans in the region. Most had to go north during the Great Migration for any chance of a better life.

Even with these hardships, the Black Belt remained a central site of resistance throughout the 20th century. It was there that civil rights activists like Rosa Parks carried the fight against segregation into the belly of the beast, and it was there that Martin Luther King Jr. witnessed some of the worst poverty in the nation, which led him to launch his final crusade, the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. Despite all of the adversities of life in the Black Belt, the region was filled with people who hoped for and demanded a brighter future. Most of these demands fell on deaf ears, with many leaders in Washington eventually turning away from the War on Poverty to embrace law-and-order politics. Yet many Black Americans stayed nonetheless. Why? Perry asks. “The answer is home.”

t makes perfect sense in the structure of the book that the chapter on the Black Belt is followed by one on South Carolina’s Lowcountry. If the Black Belt served—and in many ways continues to serve—as a physical home for so many Black Americans, the Lowcountry is Black America’s original home. Charleston was the point of entry for most enslaved Africans brought to North America. Even if a Black American does not have direct connections to the Lowcountry, they are still, in a sense, “from” there. “That is what it means to be Black American: the hidden virtue of an unsure genealogy is a vast archive of ways of being learned from birth,” Perry writes. “To this day, the children of the children of the children of the slave South, in ghettoes and hoods across the country, will clap and stomp in unison.” The Lowcountry includes some of the oldest cities in the United States, such as Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, Ga., as well as Gullah-Geechee culture. A mélange of languages and customs combining various West African traditions, Gullah-Geechee peoples form a unique culture, crafting what Perry calls “language and folkways…more distinct here than anywhere else in Black American life.”

In Charleston and the rest of South Carolina, different versions of the past and present collide almost daily. While white Charleston continues to build the city’s reputation via tourism and a somewhat whitewashed telling of the past, Black Charleston continues to serve as a home of resistance to the legacy of white supremacy and the contemporary problems of racism, gentrification, and labor. The region’s labor history alone is worth retelling, as it complicates the assumptions most Americans make about the region and race. From the 1945 Charleston Cigar Factory strike, to the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike, to 2000’s Charleston Five, who became internationally known during an International Longshoremen’s Association strike, Charleston has stood at the crossroads of race, gender, and labor activism for more than a century. The massacre of the Emanuel Nine in June 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was a national tragedy at the time, but it should now be seen as a harbinger of future white supremacist shootings such as those committed in El Paso, Buffalo, and even Christchurch, New Zealand—front lines in an asymmetric war by white supremacists against peoples of color across the globe.

In Perry’s last chapters, she moves south of the South, to Cuba and the Bahamas. She refers to these two nations as “distinct from, independent of, yet deeply familiar and bound to the United States.” For Perry, the American South has always been, in one way or another, connected to the Global South—geographically, culturally, politically, and historically. In the run-up to the Civil War, Southern leaders coveted areas south of the South for the potential expansion of the Cotton Kingdom. But even afterward, American influence and power in the area south of the South was the representative of the region. Take, for example, the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. While best remembered for Washington’s speech promising an end to agitation on racial issues, for the city’s political and business leaders, the exposition was most important as a way for the New South to announce to the world that it was open for business. Soon, investment and trade deals began to flow between the American South and South America. Slightly more than a century later, Atlanta’s hosting of the 1996 Summer Olympics was the announcement of yet another New South, this one a generation removed from the end of Jim Crow and eager to showcase its multiracial present and future—with, of course, a bottle of Coca-Cola in one hand.

hile the South is often dismissed as a region catching up to the rest of the country, Perry’s book demonstrates that the South, for better and worse, was often in the vanguard in terms of defining the promise and limits of American democracy. It was as much America’s future as it was its past. The salvation of the country, Perry argues, likewise will come from confronting the legacies and lingering power of the South’s past and, by extension, shaping its future for the better. “‘Greatness’ is such an egotistical and dangerous word,” Perry writes. “But in the land of big dreams and bigger lies, we love greatness anyway. And if we want it, if we aren’t afraid to grab it, we have to look South, to America.” Ending the book with this elegiac observation puts Perry in conversation with numerous other writers, Black and white, who also believed that the nation could be saved only by understanding and reckoning with the South.

The federal government’s embrace of Juneteenth is an occasion for both celebration and concern. Activists invested in the freedom of Black Americans rightly fear that the holiday will become commercialized and stripped of its radical, somber meaning. Finding ways to keep the spirit of Juneteenth alive will be crucial now that it’s inked its spot on calendars as America’s 11th federal holiday.

There are several ways to do this. For one, it is important to steer clear of what can be called the “MLK Day trap.” In other words, avoid making Juneteenth about one sliver of Black history, and instead make sure it captures the totality of the Black experiences of freedom in the summer of 1865. The Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday in the mainstream press is too often only about his “I Have a Dream” speech, and ignores his radical critiques the triple evils of militarism, greed, and racism. Likewise, Juneteenth coverage focusing only on the moment the formerly enslaved in Texas learn of their freedom fails to miss how that day represents a broader history of the dream of emancipation—and the reality of broken promises. As federal troops informed Black Americans in Texas about the end of slavery, actions were already underway by the Freedman’s Bureau to aid Black Americans across much of the South—many of which would shortly be overturned by the new Andrew Johnson administration.

“The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor,” Garrison Frazier told Gen. William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in January 1865. The general had asked Black Americans in Savannah, Ga., what could be done for them after their liberation by Union troops. Frazier, chosen by Black clergy in Savannah to represent them, made it clear that access to land was their best, and only, option for their communities to flourish. Shortly afterward, General Sherman issued Special Field Order Number 15, which granted the newly freed Black Americans of the coastal areas of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida roughly 40 acres of land. But less than a year later, Johnson reversed the order and returned the land to the plantation owners. Such an event should be remembered on Juneteenth, as a way to explain the possibilities that the holiday itself represents.

Juneteenth must not be tied just to the end of the Civil War but also to the Reconstruction era afterward. For some places, like Port Royal, S.C., there is no easy dividing line between the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, because they occurred concurrently. In 1861, Port Royal became one of the first places liberated by Union troops, and soon afterward, New England educators arrived in Port Royal to educate thousands of formerly enslaved Africans left behind by fleeing plantation owners. Juneteenth offers the only opportunity on the federal election calendar to celebrate the genuine heroism of the Black men and women who went from toiling in fields to, at long last, being given a chance to learn how to read and write.

In recent years, Reconstruction has received more recognition as an important period in American history. Sites such as the Reconstruction Era National Park in Beaufort, S.C., and the Museum of the Reconstruction Era in Columbia, S.C., have been at the forefront of this national public history reckoning. But more needs to be done, and the Juneteenth holiday offers a chance to talk about the era in a forthright and honest manner. Considering the echoes of “redemption” by white Southerners to destroy Reconstruction via political violence in the South being felt in the January 6 “riot” at the Capitol building, this lesson is still sorely needed.

In this sense, we must make sure Juneteenth stays relevant by connecting the day to the struggle of Black Americans to make the United States live up to its best ideals. Juneteenth should serve as an opportunity to educate Americans of all races about the contributions Black Americans such as Octavius Catto of Philadelphia or Robert Smalls of Beaufort, S.C., made to American ideals of democracy during Reconstruction. It could give us space to discuss the methods utilized by Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, and so many others to combat discrimination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of this celebrating would have to be done in local communities by educators, whether inside or outside the academy. Much of the heavy lifting to save Juneteenth from being another commercialized holiday has to be done by “everyday people.”

This brings us to a final reflection on the potential power of Juneteenth. It should never be forgotten that the holiday itself originated in Texas and is at its heart a local story of emancipation. Juneteenth would be a great opportunity to link up, or in some cases resurrect, the celebrations of Black freedom held in communities across the United States. Emancipation Day celebrations on January 1 were common in Black communities at the turn of the 20th century. Memorial Day still has special meaning for Black Charlestonians, who originated the holiday in the midst of the charred ruins of the former capital of slavery in North America in 1865.

Above all, Juneteenth allows Americans to understand that there can be more than one, or a small handful, of Black heroes in the pantheon of American champions for democracy, self-determination, and freedom. As historian and Ebony editor Lerone Bennett wrote in 1994, on the question of whether Black America should glorify Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, “It’s a question of both/and, of both Martin and Malcolm and Thurgood Marshall and Fannie Lou Hamer and the Little Rock Nine and perhaps even Marquette Frye, whose arrest sparked the Watts Rebellion.”

In short, Juneteenth, like other American holidays, may soon have its sales, fancy displays in department stores, and seasonal foods. Crass commercialization is as American as a July 4 fireworks, and so it is up to concerned and well-meaning citizens to keep the true reason for Juneteenth close to our hearts and minds: the end of enslavement in the United States and the ushering in, however brief, of a “new birth of freedom” for Black Americans. It’s the least that we can do to honor that first generation of freed Black Americans.

Hubert Harrison represents one of the clearest examples of the difficulties of being a Black intellectual and activist in the 20th century. Upon his death in 1927, Harrison was recognized in many magazines and journals for the prominent role he’d played in this country’s socialist and Black radical politics. As someone who’d organized a number of advocacy groups, as well as edited Negro World for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro

Improvement Association, Harrison was arguably at his best writing, but he was also a powerful speaker and agitator. Three decades after his death, he was still revered within the Black left. In the summer of 1963, in the midst of the decolonization movement in Africa and civil rights upheavals in the United States, an essay from a Harlem-themed issue of Freedomways put him front and center as one of the leading protagonists of the Black radical tradition. Richard B. Moore, in his article for the magazine, observed that Harrison was perhaps the greatest of the great outdoor speakers who gave Harlem’s culture its unique flair. “Above all,” Moore noted, “Hubert H. Harrison gave forth from his encyclopedic store, a wealth of knowledge of African history and culture” that presented early ideas of Black consciousness to a Harlem populace hungry for such sustenance.

Yet since the 1960s, Harrison’s genius and importance have gone somewhat into eclipse. While left intellectuals like Michael Harrington and Black socialists like A. Philip Randolph are fondly remembered, Harrison’s critical contributions to socialism and Black political thought are often unfairly passed over. Even in histories examining the Black left’s rich and important literary and activist history, Harrison’s name isn’t invoked nearly enough.

A recent two-volume biography by Jeffrey B. Perry—Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 and Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927—seeks to correct this oversight. Tracking Harrison’s life from his birth in the Danish West Indies to his long career as an activist and intellectual in Harlem, Perry leaves no stone unturned in understanding the man, the times in which he lived, and the ideals he championed. Harrison’s intellect was matched only by his steadfast refusal to bend on his principles—including not taking money from sources he disagreed with. A biography that is also a work of intellectual and institutional history, Perry’s two volumes offer an incisive survey of the radical upheaval at the turn of the 20th century. But above all they make a case for why Harrison is a crucial part of the American radical tradition.

Perry’s background as a working-class intellectual—not to mention his writings on race and labor in American life—make him the perfect person to help recover one of the early 20th century’s great Black intellectuals and socialists. Having written for publications like Black Agenda Report, CounterPunch, and many others, Perry has spent years arguing for the importance of understanding how race and class are bound together as categories used to stratify and divide American society. For Perry, what defined Harrison’s legacy as a radical was that he avowed a socialist and class-based politics and yet also refused to abandon the masses of Black Americans, north and south, in their struggle against racism. Instead, Harrison examined the problem of race and class and came to the inescapable conclusion that only mass politics and organizing among Black Americans could free them and, by extension, the working class from future exploitation.

Indeed, the story Perry presents revises what most curious readers know about the history of US radicalism in the early 20th century. Harrison played a key role in two important radical traditions at once: the Black freedom movement and the building of a Socialist Party in the United States. While many histories of the era treat the two as separate, Perry’s biography shows that for Harrison, socialism and Black radicalism were inextricably linked, motivated by the same insights and commitments; there was no way to privilege one over the other. As Perry argues in the first volume, Harrison was “the most class conscious of the race radicals, and the most race conscious of the class radicals.”

arrison’s personal life provides some sense of the ways in which he was both different from and quite similar to many other Black activists in 20th-century America. Born and raised on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean, then a colony of Denmark, Harrison grew up in a working-class home. His mother was an immigrant from the island of Barbados, and his father was once enslaved on St. Croix. Harrison’s formative years were at times difficult, Perry notes: He “worked as a servant, knew poverty, and developed an empathy with the poor.” His early experience caused Harrison to develop not only a class consciousness but also a race pride, having associated with so many others of African descent while living on the island.

In 1900, Harrison left St. Croix for New York City. “In a sense,” Perry writes, “Harrison was like many other West Indians who came to the United States at that time: young, male, and literate; thwarted by limited educational, political, and occupational opportunities at home; in search of a better life; and with a desire for more education and a propensity for self-education.” While we consider this period as one of the great ages of immigration to the United States, we usually think in terms of people coming from Southern and Eastern Europe—and perhaps the banning of immigration from China in 1882. But at the same time, many from the West Indies also came to the United States, exerting a considerable influence on Black American culture, and American culture more generally, in the 20th century.

Harrison’s arrival in New York City coincided with the aftermath of the August 1900 race riot, which injured more than 70 Black New Yorkers and marked a new low in the city’s race relations. The rest of the country was arguably worse: The South was host to an epidemic of lynching (though there were murders in the North as well). But New York City was also a harsh place for African Americans—according to Perry, “seventy percent of single Black males earned under $6, and ninety percent of single Black females under $5 per week.” Segregation marked a good deal of life in New York City as well, including education; in 1913, Perry points out, fewer than 200 Black students attended desegregated high schools. Harrison had hoped to find greater opportunity in the United States, only to discover that the country was at a “nadir” in terms of race relations. Despite proclaiming itself to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, the nation proved to be deeply oppressive for anyone of African descent.

Harrison moved in with his sister Mary and made the most of the rare opportunities offered him to pursue an education. Attending an evening high school that had mostly white students, Harrison worked during the day as an elevator operator. Despite excelling at his studies—the New York World published an article about him headlined “Speaker’s Medal to Negro Student: The Board of Education Finds a Genius in a West Indian Pupil”—Harrison would never attend college.

Instead, after high school, he became absorbed in politics. Like many other activists, Harrison sought a viable solution to the so-called “Negro Problem” of the early 20th century in whatever political programs he could find. At the time, there were many courses of action championed by Black intellectuals and activists as well as by white radicals and liberals. Booker T. Washington publicly advocated Black self-reliance and a retreat from political agitation; W.E.B. Du Bois insisted on full political rights and social agitation as the way forward; Marcus Garvey preached a form of Black nationalism that linked the plight of Black Americans and those of African descent around the world, while harboring a distrust of white America and a refusal to see desegregation as possible—or even desirable. There was also the liberal Black politics that emerged with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which included Mary Church Terrell, James Weldon Johnson, and numerous others who favored the creation of biracial organizations to combat the rampant racism of the day through political and moral suasion, boycotts, and legal campaigns against Jim Crow segregation in its many forms.

Harrison’s approach cobbled together much of the above, with an added emphasis on socialism. Drawn to the Socialist Party’s aggressive advocacy on behalf of immigrants’ and women’s rights in New York, he worked for the party as an organizer and writer. He also supported the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—and their leader, “Big” Bill Haywood, throughout the 1910s. For Harrison, the Socialist Party offered the chance to be a leader in the fight for greater rights for the working class, including Black workers. In Harlem, he formed a Colored Socialist Club—not, as he explained to Du Bois, to separate Black socialists from their white peers, but rather to meet Black Americans wherever they were, ideologically and literally. As Harrison wrote, “The work must be done where Negroes ‘most do congregate.’”

However, he became increasingly frustrated by the racism and anti-Black thinking that permeated parts of the Socialist Party, and he sought to persuade his fellow socialists to make race more central to the party’s clarion call to workers caught in the class struggle in the United States. This proved to be an uphill battle for Harrison and others. As Perry notes, leading socialists like Victor L. Berger—who would later become a US congressman for Wisconsin—argued in 1902 that “negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race.” Meanwhile, even those who declared a commitment to racial equality minimized its importance when it came to organizing. Eugene Debs, in 1903, argued that “the history of the Negro in the United States is a history of crime without a parallel.” Yet in the same essay, “The Negro in the Class Struggle,” Debs finished by stating plainly, “We have nothing special to offer to the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.” For Debs, the class struggle subsumed all other struggles in American society. For Harrison, this was at best a fallacy and at worst a critical strategic mistake. Like other Black socialists, he argued that “the ten million Negroes of America form a group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group.” They could, if approached with sophistication and understanding, become the backbone of a larger socialist movement in the United States. But the concern of many Socialist Party leaders, including Debs, that appealing directly to Black Americans would divide the working class stopped the party from ever fully embracing this position.

For a time, Harrison continued to push the Socialist Party on the issue of anti-Black racism and to make the party an attractive alternative for African Americans in an era when both the Democrats and the Republicans expressed little interest in attracting Black voters. But in the end, his efforts were unsuccessful, and his Colored Socialist Club began to founder after it failed to receive enough support from the rest of the party in New York City.

ven as he grew distant from the Socialist Party, Harrison never completely abandoned socialism, but he began to look beyond its institutions and clubs when it came to matters of politics. He crossed paths with Washington, Du Bois, and Randolph, at once befriending and establishing rivalries with them as he vied for the attention of the people of Harlem. Harrison envisioned a movement for the Black masses instead of what most of his contemporaries offered, such as the “Talented Tenth” proposed by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk or other attempts to create a small cadre of Black radicals to lead the movement. Harrison argued that the potential members of the Talented Tenth were “the left-handed progeny of the white masters” and could not function without white patronage. He also argued that Washington’s notion of building up Black capital through hard work and vocational education was wrongheaded, asserting that Washington wanted the political and social relations of Black people to be “one of submission and acquiescence in political servitude.” At the same time, Harrison felt that the newly created NAACP was a good start—but that the organization was still too concerned with the opinions and goals of white liberals.

During this period, Harrison began to develop a view of Black liberation that was worldwide in scope and not merely focused on the United States. Even as other Black leaders, most notably Du Bois, asked African Americans to “close ranks” and get behind the US entry into World War I, Harrison made no secret of his contempt for those who did. For Harrison, it was more important for Black Americans to arm themselves for the battle at home—and in this case, his words were not meant to be taken metaphorically. In the aftermath of the East St. Louis riots of July 1917, Harrison urged Black people to embrace armed self-defense as a proper and necessary strategy in the face of rampant oppression. The New York Times quoted him as saying, “We intend to fight if we must…for the things dearest to us, our hearth and our homes.”

Harrison’s squabbles with Du Bois over the war may have pushed him to the margins of mainstream Black thought, but by the end of the war Harrison was moving toward the center of the “New Negro” movement. With the rise of this movement and the Harlem Renaissance, Harrison’s socialism, Black radicalism, internationalism, and modernism all found new audiences among Black Americans. Cochairing the Liberty Congress in 1918, he had a front-row seat to observe the growing radicalism of a younger group of Black Americans that formed the heart and soul of both of these movements. The New Negro movement, in particular, embraced what Harrison referred to as “the Race Consciousness of the Negro people.” His earlier call for Black people to arm themselves after the East St. Louis riots also became a hallmark of the New Negro movement—an acceptance of the idea of armed self-defense and other militant tools in the greater struggle for human rights. Until then, Harrison had remained committed to a politics that had not created a mass movement. Now, leading the effort to resurrect the Harlem Voice newspaper in 1918, he found himself at the center of a new political and intellectual ferment, hatching a plan for organizing that would anticipate efforts by the Southern Negro Youth Congress, the Black Panthers, and a variety of other groups devoted, in one form or another, to organizing the Black working class in the United States.

The focus of Harrison’s ambitions was the South. He had grown tired of what he saw as the play-it-safe tactics of groups like the NAACP (which some of his radical peers derided as the “National Association for the Acceptance of Colored Proscription”) in the region. Part of this frustration stemmed from political setbacks, but it also came from his growing belief that very few white liberal activists could be trusted, even if they had the money and cultural and political prestige to lend legitimacy to a project. For Harrison, Black people could not trust others to do the work of emancipating Black America; they would have to do it themselves. This commitment to Black agency and self-help led him to Marcus Garvey, who had arrived in New York City from Jamaica in 1916, bringing with him his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which had already been active on the island. Harrison and Garvey met in the revolutionary year of 1917, and, according to Perry, Harrison’s views on Black independence heavily influenced Garvey during the latter’s time in New York. Garvey attended meetings of Harrison’s Liberty League, and Harrison encouraged the league’s members to also attend Garvey’s events.

Harrison would eventually join the UNIA and serve as the editor of its newspaper, Negro World, which he elevated to a new level of sophisticated political engagement with the wider Black diaspora. Beginning his tenure during the “Red Summer” of 1919, against the backdrop of heightened labor strife in the United States and nationwide campaigns against the lives and livelihoods of African Americans, Harrison sought to use his editorial position to rally Black America and lauded those who embraced his calls to action, hailing the resistance against the Red Summer attacks as one of the “brilliant events in the history of the Negro race in America.”

Harrison also became increasingly vocal about his internationalism during this time. In a dazzling variety of ways, he used his powerful perch at Negro World to promote ideas of Black diasporic solidarity and to highlight the weaknesses he perceived in liberal attempts to fight segregation in the United States. For Harrison, Black Americans, West Indians, and other elements of the broader Black diaspora had far more in common than they recognized: All of them were subjugated by the forces of capitalism, colonialism, and European assumptions of superiority. In addition, Harrison argued that Black Americans had much to learn from their brothers and sisters in Africa. “Africa was primarily a teacher,” he insisted, “not a primitive unschooled child in need of ‘civilization’ and instruction.” In every issue of Negro World, Harrison included sections on news from Africa and on “the status and welfare of the darker races and of subject peoples everywhere.”

Criticizing Black socialists like Randolph for continuing their class-first pronouncements, Harrison argued for a “race first” approach that, he insisted, did not abandon socialism. At times, he challenged Randolph and other Black socialists for what he considered to be their political naivete in navigating the complicated waters of city politics. In 1918, for example, Randolph ran for the 19th Assembly District and, in Harrison’s eyes, prevented the potential victory of a Black Republican, Edward A. Johnson. Harrison reasoned, as Perry writes, that it was more important “to break the white monopoly on holding office” than it was to support a Black socialist for the mere sake of supporting one. Harrison’s tactical and intellectual arguments with Randolph and other Black socialists continued throughout the Great War period and into the 1920s. What was paramount for Harrison was the adoption by Black Americans of a race-centric strategy that would also allow room for a strong class politics. In 1920, his debates with Randolph and Chandler Owen, both editors of The Emancipator, were partly born out of Harrison’s need to defend what he called “the principles of the New Negro Manhood Movement” from attacks by the two. However, even the editors of The Emancipator—which was created by the merger of the better-known The Messenger (edited by Randolph and Owen) and The Crusader (formerly edited by the activist and intellectual Cyril Briggs)—were far from united on the question of putting class ahead of race. Whereas Harrison criticized Randolph for continuing in his class-first analysis, Randolph retorted that Harrison’s work with Garvey had tainted him with the larger problems that many Black activists—socialist or liberal—had experienced with Garveyism and the UNIA. (Nonetheless, when Harrison died, in 1927, Randolph paid him tribute as “our comrade and co-fighter for race justice.”)

In fact, Harrison’s continued commitment to class politics also separated him from Garvey, as did the latter’s grandiose style. Harrison grew exasperated with Garvey’s ostentatious uniforms and grand public pronouncements and eventually left his position as editor of Negro World. The final straw was Garvey’s misuse of funds, which to Harrison was especially egregious considering the working-class background of the vast majority of UNIA members.

areening from one organization to another often left Harrison without a steady job. He also refused to be supported by wealthy benefactors, and he and his family experienced bouts of poverty. These periods, however, only further fueled his intellectual fire and radicalism.

How this working-class immigrant sustained himself as an activist-intellectual is an important part of the story that Perry seeks to tell. Harrison was an organic intellectual—someone who, through his own determination and genius, shaped for generations the debates about class and race in Black America. Shut out by the racist system of higher education, Harrison taught himself, hungry for knowledge and eager to read everything he could that would help him better understand his and Black America’s history, culture, and politics. In this way, Harrison was not just the intellectual forefather of activists like Malcolm X or Kwame Ture. He was also an inspiration to historians like John Henrik Clarke and J.A. Rogers, both of whom pursued unorthodox routes of rigorous self-study to become two of the best-known historians of the Black experience in the United States. While Clarke did not receive his doctorate until late in life, and Rogers never received formal training as a historian, like Harrison both men were part of the autodidact tradition of Black American letters. Harrison has been called the “father of Harlem Radicalism,” and in his day many referred to him as “Dr. Harrison,” assuming that one as erudite and brilliant as he must have received a doctoral degree.

Yet he also struggled considerably—because of both his poverty and his commitments. He had difficulty taking care of his family because of his inability to find steady work. By December 1927, Harrison had already dealt with a serious illness the previous year, and he found himself back in the hospital after an appendicitis attack, only to die following a routine surgery. His premature death at the age of 44 came as a shock, and it robbed the world of an incredible intellect and radical agitator. One wonders what Harrison’s role would have been in the 1930s, as the Communist Party took up the cause of Black freedom in the North and the South. Would he have renewed his friendship with Du Bois as the latter became more radical? Or would he have just said “I told you so”? What might have come of his commitment to both Black and working-class freedom? Harrison maintained a pride in being Black, but he was also convinced that to embrace Blackness meant pursuing a global program of solidarity to combat racism and militarism across the world.

Upon the news of his death, The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the prominent Black newspapers of the 20th century, wrote that “The Race loses a stalwart champion in Dr. Harrison.” Humanity did too. When one reads Perry’s two-volume biography, it is nearly impossible to avoid letting one’s mind run away with ideas of what could have been—for the fight for Black freedom in America and for the struggle against class oppression. In the present day, with the arguments about class- or race-first remedies for Black oppression still not settled, Harrison would want us all to sharpen our analysis, for the sake of a continuing battle for the future that he never lived to see.

The historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States are under attack, it seems, from multiple directions. In recent weeks, numerous HBCUs have reported bomb threats against them. Such threats have hit institutions such as Howard University in Washington, D.C., Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga., and Alcorn State in Claiborne County, Miss. It augurs poorly for the current state of race relations, as these schools have long served the Black American community. At the same time, a recent report from Forbes indicated the extent to which land-grant HBCUs—a significant number of these institutions—have been woefully underfunded by state governments since 1987. In both cases, we see a continuing attack on not just HBCUs but the very idea of semi-independent Black institutions within the United States.

All of this comes at an already remarkable moment in the history of HBCUs. In recent years, attendance at these institutions has risen, coupled with the rise of Black Lives Matter on the one hand, and a significant white backlash against racial progress on the other. For some students attending HBCUs, the perceived safety they provide against backlash and the feeling of alienation on the campuses of many predominantly white institutions is a valuable reason to attend an HBCU. Sports programs at HBCUs continue to attract the best of Black athletic talent in the nation. Deion Sanders’s coaching at Jackson State, as one example, shows how even retired Black athletes have begun to give back to HBCUs as coaches.

Yet the actions that have jarred students, faculty, staff, and alumni at these institutions should not be surprising. Since the founding of the earliest HBCUs in the 19th century, such schools have always been targets of terrorism and intimidation. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, HBCU buildings were sometimes burned to the ground. A few were forced to change location, and one was even permanently closed. For much of their history, HBCUs have provided the intellectual training for so many of the nation’s greatest leaders. Martin Luther King Jr. earned his undergraduate degree at Morehouse College of Atlanta. Before he graced the halls of Harvard and Humboldt University of Berlin, and set out to determine that the color line would determine the course of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois studied at Fisk University in Nashville. Mary McLeod Bethune’s education at Scotia Seminary—now Barbara-Scotia College in Concord, N.C.—prepared her for a life devoted to educating others.

What these and so many other stories of Black success at these schools indicate is the importance of Black institutions in a society so often hostile to Black success. That such schools are being targeted with bomb threats today is, unless further information proves otherwise, a clear indication of how that success is still reviled in some corners of American society now. HBCUs produce a large number of Black professionals in numerous careers. Add to that the long tradition of student activism at many of these institutions, and it becomes clear why so many of these places are important for not just Black advancement but also the continuing struggle to realize the dream of a true, multiracial American democracy.

This is what makes protecting HBCUs so important. During the tumult of the civil rights and Black Power movements, HBCUs were a key site of organizing and activism—and not just against Jim Crow segregation or the Vietnam War. Often, students had to struggle against their own college presidents just to have the right to protest, since those presidents needed monetary support from pro–Jim Crow Southern state legislatures. From Howard to Voorhees College in Denmark, S.C., and numerous other colleges and universities, students tried to make change for both their universities and the broader community.

The murder of students from South Carolina State during the Orangeburg Massacre of February 1968 and of Jackson State students in May 1970, both during otherwise peaceful protests, is also a reminder of how HBCU students understand the dangers inherent in the pursuit of justice and freedom. The killings at Jackson State are particularly telling, as they took place on the campus itself and involved members of both the local police force and the Mississippi Highway Patrol. Overshadowed by the Kent State shooting that took place 11 days before, the Jackson State tragedy was a reminder of the limits of how safe Black students could feel on their own campus.

We should all also be concerned about HBCUs because of what they could represent in American society. Despite their importance as institutions for Black students, they have not been immune to the problems of neoliberalism that have gripped the academy for decades. The debate between Booker T. Washington, on one hand, and intellectuals such as Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper, on the other, about the fate of Black education show that this problem stretches back far longer than contemporary arguments about the purpose of a college education.

Du Bois always dreamed that, because of the problems facing them, Black Americans could use their institutions to provide a new, fresh model for education. This, he believed, would turn the tide against an overwhelming tendency of those who attended school to be concerned with just job prospects. In a commencement address to his alma mater, Fisk, in 1958 he stated, “I found to my deep disappointment that the American nation was not interested in supporting the search for knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Yet, even as he lamented what even Fisk and other Black colleges and universities had become in his eyes—calling Fisk “a refuge for spoiled children”—Du Bois nonetheless believed that such schools still held within them a deeper promise. “We face then,” he argued, “the preservation and cultivation of Negro talent not simply among our rich and well-to-do, but even more among the vast numbers of our poor and outcast; among those locked by the thousands in our jails and penitentiaries.”

This is a mission HBCUs must continue to fulfill today. The latest iteration of white backlash politics that infects every vestige of American life requires it. Ironically, on the day I finished writing the first draft of this piece, my current place of employment—Claflin University—received a bomb threat. The problem is not gone. But the HBCUs that serve as fortresses of Black knowledge and achievement continue to survive.

The publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019 pushed many Americans to reconsider what they assumed they knew about African American and, more generally, US history. The project, whose title refers to the importation of the first enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony in 1619, sought to show how, in the introductory words of its special issue, “no aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.”

There were good reasons to start the project in 1619—many African Americans trace the beginnings of Black America to this moment—and to focus on Virginia, but it could have started earlier, too. The story of Africans in North America can, in fact, be traced as far back as 1526 and the creation of the San Miguel de Gualdape colony in what would become South Carolina—a colony that was likely destroyed by a mutiny of the colonists and a slave revolt. More than 140 years later, the colony of Carolina would be founded by English settlers from Barbados who hoped to create a settlement purely for the purpose of plantation slavery.

Annette Gordon-Reed’s new book, On Juneteenth, considers another set of bifurcating paths in African American history—this time in her home state of Texas, where both her own history and that of Juneteenth began. Texas, she argues, provides a key to the history of Africans in North America, and, coupled with the rapidly popularized holiday of Juneteenth, offers a different perspective from the one to which most Americans are accustomed. For her, the history of Black Texas, in fact, allows one to tell the larger history of Black America. “The history of Juneteenth,” she writes, “which includes the many years before the events in Galveston and afterward, shows that Texas, more than any [other] state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.”

This is a bold statement. Others might alternately cite the Low Country of South Carolina or the Mississippi Delta or the South Side of Chicago. Yet Gordon-
Reed’s contention, by the end of her book, proves hard to dismiss. By using the history of Black Texas, she is also able to tell the story of Black America, and by doing so, she places Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans at the forefront of US history. If nothing else, she shifts its focus away from the East Coast origin stories of Jamestown and Plymouth and toward the West. Everything is bigger in Texas, and in the hands of 
Gordon-Reed, the history of Texas becomes large enough to encompass the fullness of the American story.

ordon-Reed has spent her career studying the majestic and often confounding contradictions of American life and how we memorialize them. Her two best-known works—1997’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and 2008’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family—told the story of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who was forcibly involved in a sexual relationship with Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings offered a thorough account of the relationship between the two, a subject that had long been ignored by many Jefferson scholars. The book also proved to be something far more: an analysis of those historians who refused to reckon with the centrality of slavery in the founding of the United States—and in particular its importance in the lives of the country’s “founding fathers.”

Much of this previous scholarship was criticized by Gordon-Reed “as a rejection of black people’s input and black people’s participation in American society.” Along with an emerging new generation of historians, she sought to correct this. As David Walton argued in his review of the book in The New York Times, Gordon-Reed provided a “devastating and persuasive critique of those who have rejected” the possibility of Jefferson having sex with Hemings and “is sure to be the next-to-last word for every historian who writes about this story hereafter.”

The Hemingses of Monticello was arguably even more groundbreaking, shifting the traditional lens on Monticello from Jefferson and Hemings to the family tree they produced. The book, for which she became the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for History, was also part of a larger goal at the center of her career: to push Americans to rethink their nation’s past—in particular, its origin myths. Her scholarship, Gordon-Reed explained in an interview, sought to establish “black people’s participation as American citizens from the very beginning.” For her, this was more than a matter of the historical record; it was also an assertion of citizenship. Because white supremacy had so deeply influenced the telling of US history, she noted, “you have to be able to help write the history of the country in order to establish your right to be here, to say that you’re legitimately here.”

This quest to re-center American history around the experience of those who are not white is also at the core of On Juneteenth. By focusing on Texas, 
Gordon-Reed can tell not only the story of Black America but also “of Indians, settler colonialists, Hispanic culture in North America, slavery, race, and immigration. It is the American story, told from this most American place.” She does have a point: Nearly every great movement in American history did, at some time, touch Texas. Everything from the rise and fall of slavery in antebellum America to the Populist movement to the civil rights movement and the white backlash against it has left an imprint on the history of Texas, and, in turn, Texas impacted each of them in ways the entire United States had to deal with.

The origin of Juneteenth exemplifies the central role Texas played in the history of Black America. When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston on June 19, 1865, and informed the enslaved that they were free, the Civil War had ended across much of the South, and the region—and most of the nation—was convulsing with the beginnings of Reconstruction. If the Confederacy had won the Civil War, Texas would likely have become the chief example of what that government would have stood for—not only as a bastion of slavery but as a harbinger of its expansion throughout the Western Hemisphere via white settler colonialism and violent confrontation. But with Granger’s emancipatory declaration, and in the aftermath of the South’s defeat, Texas became an arena in which those pursuing a more inclusive idea of American freedom battled those seeking to restore the subservient relationship of African Americans as close to the old form of slavery as possible. Before the Civil War, Texas took steps in its Constitution to prevent the movement of free African Americans into the state. “Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery,” Gordon-Reed writes, “put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves.”

For Gordon-Reed, the history of East Texas, which was the nexus of slavery in the state and where much of the fight over the terms of emancipation raged, helps tell this story of American contradictions in microcosm. Reconstruction was a bloody affair across the South, but in Texas it was especially grim—in part because, Gordon-Reed notes, the white population still remembered that the state had been a republic. The struggles over civil and political rights that roiled the nation during Reconstruction were magnified in Texas by the contradictions of self-government—of a white majority seeking to impose its will on a large Black minority.

The pursuit of emancipation was frustrated almost from the start. Gen. Philip Sheridan, the military commander of the Fifth Military District (Texas and Louisiana), created by the Reconstruction Act of 1867, worked hard to protect the rights of newly freed African Americans, but as a result he drew the ire of former Confederates and eventually was fired by President Andrew Johnson. (Sheridan purportedly said, “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.”) His replacement, Winfield Scott Hancock, was far more lenient toward white Southerners who resisted giving Black Americans any rights whatsoever. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted in Black Reconstruction in America, citing a report from the Committee on Lawlessness and Violence in Texas, “Charged by law to keep the peace and afford protection to life and property, and having the army of the United States to assist him in so doing, [Hancock] has failed.”

For generations afterward, African Americans would fight to save Texas from the hell it had been turned into by white supremacy. Black Texans like Norris Wright Cuney would play a pivotal role in helping other Black citizens get involved in their native state’s politics. Cuney himself would become the Texas national committeeman of the Republican Party in 1886 and as president of the Union League led the national fight against the attempts of the party’s conservative wing to purge what was left of the Southern Black leadership. Like Sheridan, however, Cuney found that his leadership of the Texas GOP was one of the last hurrahs of the emancipationist spirit of the 1860s. Even if Texas was the state in which Juneteenth and the celebrations that followed were born, so, too, was it a state of stalwart resistance to Reconstruction and Black freedom.

or Gordon-Reed, who was born in 1958, this grim past was never dead. Growing up in East Texas, she saw living reminders of it all around her—both the struggles for freedom and the institutions created by African Americans to survive in a cruel Jim Crow system. Just as in the years after the Civil War, the power and dogged determination of white supremacy persisted.

As Gordon-Reed recounts of her own childhood, she initially attended an African American school, as so many of her friends and family had, before becoming one of the first Black students in her area to desegregate an all-white school. Entering first grade in the mid-1960s, she was enrolled in the Anderson Elementary School, leaving behind her all-Black school, Booker T. Washington. While some Black parents frowned on the Gordons’ sending their child to a previously all-white school, Gordon-Reed remembered the moment as one that was as much about practicality as politics. Her father, Alfred Gordon Sr., simply believed it made more sense for a school to have students correctly separated by age. Anderson Elementary provided that; Booker T., as it was affectionately known, did not. But it also meant that Gordon-Reed would be the only Black student there.

Gordon-Reed excelled in school, both at Booker T  . and at Anderson. At the time, she felt that she “never experienced any different treatment…. In fact, I felt nothing but…support.” Still, she knew and understood that she was different from the other students—and that she had to excel on behalf of the Black community. “This period was intense,” she writes. “My mother remembers me breaking out in hives at one point, a thing I don’t recall.”

Gordon-Reed’s experience of desegregation is a valuable one. Often, the story of school desegregation follows a student or students—the Little Rock Nine of Arkansas, for example—up to the school door and then leaves them to be immortalized in history. There is little consideration about the short- and long-term consequences of the experience on the children. “There was an oddity of being on display,” Gordon-Reed recalls, but few considered the effects of desegregation on the Black students who entered the formerly all-white schools—especially those, like Gordon-Reed, who were on their own. “Not to take anything away from the teachers and administrators at Anderson, but I did make things easy for them,” she adds. Her intellect certainly helped, but so did the fact that, because she was the only Black person enrolled at the school, she was not seen as an “invasion” of Black students. “The degree of racial tolerance among Whites has always been about numbers,” she notes.

Gordon-Reed’s experiences after high school were like those of other African Americans who came of age during the civil rights and Black Power eras: increased opportunities for education at the finest of American universities. For Gordon-Reed, that meant attending Dartmouth College in the late 1970s and, eventually, Harvard Law School. But the experience of desegregating a school—and understanding what that desegregation meant for other African Americans—lingered, both for her and, more broadly, she argues, as a feature of the history of Texas and Black America.

Like her earlier work on the Hemingses, On Juneteenth is determined to force us to rethink our origin stories. As Gordon-Reed notes, for example, the push for desegregating schools did mark the beginning of a new turn in Black freedom, but it was also greeted ambivalently by more African Americans than classic narratives of the civil rights movement would have us believe: “Some members of the Black community felt that my parents were making a statement—alas, a negative one—about the quality of teaching and education at Washington.” Leaving Booker T. 
for a formerly all-white institution was seen in her African American community as equal parts heroic and bordering on betrayal. For most, Black schools were symbols of community empowerment and self-determination—symbols that, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, would eventually be degraded and destroyed by an education system that had previously ignored them.

Eschewing nostalgia, Gordon-Reed demands that her readers reexamine their assumptions about American history and their commitments in the present. Focusing on the history of African Americans in Texas helps her make this compelling argument for an update to the story of America: She welds a new narrative onto the one we already have. “Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations,” she explains, but we also need to separate out the “origin stories” we tell ourselves from actual history, making it clear that the two are often not the same.

Gordon-Reed challenged the infallibility and the mythology of the founding fathers through her work on Jefferson and the Hemingses, and in On Juneteenth, she spends a considerable amount of time demarcating the differences between the origin story that places the beginning of the United States in Plymouth—“a founding story about valiant people leaving their homes to escape religious persecution”—and the one that places it in Jamestown colony: “It is difficult to wrest an uplifting story from the doings of English settlers who created the colony for no purpose other than making money or, at least, to make a living for themselves.” Starting before 1619 and beyond Jamestown colony, she argues, also gives the African American experience a longer and more international origin story, touching as it would on the presence of Estebanico, an enslaved African explorer who was part of the Spanish expedition of what is now Texas in the 1530s.

Spanish St. Augustine, Gordon-Reed writes, had long existed partly as a settlement for Africans who’d escaped slavery in the English colonies, and ignoring the presence of Africans in other European settlements in North America—whether established by the Spanish, the French, or the Dutch—led to what she calls “an extremely narrow construction of Blackness.” By considering the other Black Americas—those formed outside the reach of the English-speaking colonies—Gordon-
Reed also helps us better understand the relationships among African, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans and reminds us of the non-Anglophone influences on the formation of what became the United States. By incorporating so much recent scholarship on the Atlantic world and the early encounters among various ethnic and racial groups in North America, she argues, we can understand “that the origin story of Africans in North America is much richer and more complicated than the story of twenty Africans arriving in Jamestown in 1619.”

s readers come to the end of On Juneteenth, they begin to realize that as much as the emancipation in Galveston and the original holiday of Juneteenth frame the book, contrasting these different origin stories is one of its central premises. Even the origin story of Texas comes under scrutiny. Building on the scholarship of others, Gordon-Reed notes that the early days of Texas’s struggle for independence from Mexico were also tied to the institution of slavery. Rather than pursue freedom, the white Americans who fought for Texan independence sought to create a slaveholding republic. Growing up in Jim Crow–era Texas, a young Annette Gordon was not taught this. When it came to the Alamo, the birthplace of modern Texas, she writes, “I didn’t know that an enslaved person was there.” For Americans who wish to avoid the unpleasantness of racism in our country’s past, Gordon-Reed points to the documents themselves. “Race is right there in the documents—official and personal,” she writes. Texas’s own constitution, promulgated after independence in 1836, explicitly excluded free people of African descent from citizenship. Black people in Texas were to be there for one reason: enslavement.

Gordon-Reed also writes of how Texas’s oft-recounted origin story elides the plight of Indigenous peoples. The early Republic of Texas under Sam Houston could potentially countenance living side by side with Indigenous groups like the Alabamas and Coushattas, but later Texas leaders insisted on the familiar American pattern of driving Indigenous groups from their lands. This experience of oppression also linked the fates of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples: Both had a common enemy in white supremacy, one that was around after slavery’s abolition. As a young girl coming of age during not only the civil rights and Black Power eras but also the rise of the American Indian Movement of the 1970s, Gordon-Reed wondered why Indigenous and African groups had not joined forces against the Europeans in North America. One complicating factor was certainly that some Indigenous peoples also held Africans in slavery. “There was no ‘natural’ alliance” between the groups, Gordon-Reed writes, reminding us once again of the problem of crafting myths about the past, as opposed to cold, hard actual history. “Writers, and consumers, of history must take great care not to import the knowledge we have into the minds of people and of circumstances in the past,” she warns.

On Juneteenth begins and ends with the holiday of the same name, and here too Gordon-Reed reminds us that like origin stories, our regional and national holidays say a great deal about the stories we wish to tell about ourselves. While at the beginning of the book Gordon-
Reed expresses surprise—and a little consternation—that a holiday celebrated primarily in Texas during her life has become nationally known, at the end she reminisces about how Juneteenth was an important part of her life, and one that incorporated cultural traditions from other groups.

Juneteenth celebrations, Gordon-Reed tells us, included the traditional “red ‘soda-
water’”—a delicious strawberry-flavored drink that some argue traces its origins to the hibiscus tea of West Africa—seen at so many African American holiday gatherings, but they also included the preparation of tamales, a dish originating with Mesoamerican civilizations, and pointed to the ways in which Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic Americas intersected in Texas. Such a set of culinary rituals, Gordon-
Reed writes, made the day “so very Texan.” But as she goes on to argue, it also made the day—and its history—so very American.

Making Juneteenth into a national holiday not only nationalizes Texas’s history but, Gordon-Reed argues, also serves as a moment of national reflection on the effort needed to destroy slavery and, in its aftermath, the struggle to affirm a new birth of freedom. With Republican politicians pushing to abolish critical race theory and the continued assaults on use of the 1619 Project in the classroom—not to mention the raging debates about Confederate statues and other “Lost Cause” memorials—it is clear that powerful leaders in society also understand the importance of historical memory. Besides origin stories, Gordon-Reed reminds us, history provides us with a way to think about the present and future—and, just as with the past, the remaking of our contemporary world will likely be messier, if potentially more emancipatory, but also more tragic than any of us is willing to fathom.

Certain cities in the United States have developed a claim to fame for representing some vital aspect of America. New York City has often been hailed as its financial and cultural capital. Chicago, the “big shoulders” of the nation, has been depicted as its boisterous center of industry. Berkeley, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass., serve as symbols of American liberalism, and Atlanta as the political and economic capital of Black America.

According to historian and native son Walter Johnson, St. Louis can serve as a symbol of US imperial expansion and racial formation, a “crucible of American history…[at] the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness.” Throughout its existence, Johnson argues, St. Louis has been a microcosm of America’s long-standing compulsion to subvert its own high ideals for the sake of white supremacy and imperialism. But as Johnson shows, the story of St. Louis is not just one of catastrophe; it is also one of constant resistance to the worst in American history, led by men and women spurred to dream of a better nation. It has been a site for movements of radical hope and resistance to class injustice. St. Louis is where workers established a commune in 1877 that rivaled the one in Paris, and where organized Black working-class men and women inspired people like the historian C. L. R. James and the journalist Claudia Jones to draw lessons from them.

In his new book, The Broken Heart of America, Johnson sets out to convey this twin narrative—of empire-building and racism and of the people seeking to end those evils and remake the country into a genuine democracy—through St. Louis’s incredible history. The city has been at the forefront of American conquest and at the center of American race relations, serving as both a military base and an industrial powerhouse. At the same time, it has often been an arena for those seeking to resist America’s usual predilections for empire and racism. American communism, Black nationalism, the civil rights movement, and Black Lives Matter all found in St. Louis a critical fulcrum on which American history turned, morphed, and redefined itself. The Gateway to the West, as Johnson shows, is also a gateway to understanding America’s violent, unpredictable, and yet sometimes hopeful past.

he Broken Heart of America begins with the ancient Indigenous city of Cahokia and then turns to the Lewis and Clark expedition, which set out from St. Louis, then a frontier town and military installation, to map the territory gained from the French Empire through the Louisiana Purchase. While the expedition was dedicated to exploring what would become the American West, it also helped chart the rise of the burgeoning city. William Clark was an cartographer and leader of the so-called Corps of Discovery, and his actions during and after the expedition generated “knowledge in the service of empire”—a story that Johnson uses to great effect. After Clark returned from the West, he was appointed superintendent of Indian affairs for the Louisiana Territory, an office based in St. Louis that he held for the rest of his life, with an intervening stint as the first governor of the Missouri territory. Clark soon found himself caught between two worlds, maintaining a diplomatic and trade-based relationship with Indigenous groups while also answering to increasingly land-hungry white settlers. He struggled to balance these competing interests, which reflected two conflicting Missouris: one that belonged to Native Americans and one that was being conquered by a white settler population.

Clark’s balancing act didn’t last long and eventually led to his defeat in the state’s first election for the governorship in 1820. Clark was opposed by white settlers who insisted that he had not been forceful enough against the tribes in the area, including the Osage and Mandan peoples. Not that the tribes would have viewed their relationship with Clark favorably, either: Remaining as superintendent of Indian Affairs until his death in 1838, Clark would add “some 419 million acres to the domain of the United States and remove over 81,000 Indians from their homelands,” Johnson writes. Before the United States had military bases dotting the globe, before American political and military might forced the creation of the Panama Canal and the seizure of various lands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, Clark’s St. Louis would serve as the logistical and material hub of a growing US empire in North America. It was a legacy, Johnson notes, that would continue into the 20th and 21st centuries, as the city became a center of commerce in the Western Hemisphere and a place where the lessons of empire would be implemented at home by local police trying to suppress dissent.

The rise and fall of the slave power in the United States, like the rise of the American empire, was also reflected in the history of St. Louis and Missouri. The state’s request for entry to the union in 1818 precipitated the Missouri Crisis. Members of Congress repeatedly spoke of disunion when describing the potential ill effects of Missouri’s entrance as a slave state. Without a compromise—which was eventually achieved by introducing Maine as a free state—civil war appeared to loom on the horizon.

But Missouri was not only an emblem of the slave power’s increasing hold on the American republic. In the years after achieving statehood, Missouri—and St. Louis in particular—became the site of a growing resistance within the South to slavery and the slave power’s national and international influence. Dred Scott, an enslaved man living in Missouri, sued his master Irene Emerson. Scott and Scott’s wife, Harriet Robinson, had lived for six years in the Illinois and Wisconsin territories while still under the ownership of Emerson and her late husband. Because slavery was illegal in those territories, Scott argued that the time he and Robinson had spent there had made them free. The case was immortalized in 1857, when the Supreme Court ruled against Scott.

Yet the struggle against the slave power continued as St. Louis became home to a large population of German immigrants fleeing their homeland after the failed revolutions of 1848. Their impact on the Civil War and post-Civil War history of St. Louis, and on the country in general, also marked a powerful moment of radicalism in the Atlantic world, as the dreams of European egalitarians merged with those of radicals in the United States.

As a result, Johnson suggests, St. Louis could have followed one of two political paths. The first was blazed by Thomas Hart Benton, the Missouri senator whom Johnson describes as the “prophet” of an imperial United States stretching to the Pacific Ocean and beyond. While serving in the Senate, Benton sponsored several Western expeditions and repeatedly pushed for the construction of military bases throughout the West, to dominate trade with various Indigenous groups, and for a transcontinental railroad. The other was the path supported by Missouri’s radical European immigrants and free Blacks and represented by people like Joseph Weydemeyer, one of the greatest left-wing figures and socialist activists in American history.

oseph Weydemeyer should be at the top of any list of people in American history whose untimely death provokes the question “What if?” Described by Karl Marx as “one of our best people” in the United States, Weydemeyer arrived in the country in 1851 and pushed activists and intellectuals to forcefully address the problem of slavery. When war finally came in 1861, he and many other German immigrants offered their services to the Union. For Weydemeyer and some of his radical allies, the slave power had to be broken before communism could come to the United States. Weydemeyer ended up serving as a colonel in charge of the defense of St. Louis. Yet his most important contributions were not military in nature, but rather the central role he and his comrades played in the political battles of Civil War–era St. Louis.

Not all of the city’s German residents saw the end of slavery and the victory of the Union as a way to open the nation to more radical dreams. Carl Schurz, who came to the United States in 1852, supported the end of slavery, but after the Union’s victory in 1865, he backed the liberal wing of the Republican Party, which was much less devoted to establishing Black civil and political rights than to enshrining the ideal of free labor across the land—often at the expense of those doing this labor. As Johnson documents, the divisions among Missouri’s Germans over the course of Reconstruction—embodied by the competing visions of Weydemeyer and Schurz—mirrored the divides within the Republican Party and the United States itself. Schurz, like many other Republicans early in the Reconstruction era in 1866 and ‘67, supported political measures that helped enfranchise and empower the newly freed African Americans. But by 1872, he was one of those liberal Republicans who turned away from the racial progress of Reconstruction and saw the plight of Black Americans as something to be solved by the white South.

Weydemeyer, meanwhile, continued as a left-wing beacon. Who knows what would have become of his vision had he not died of cholera in 1866, at age 48. But even after his death, his radical vision lived on—notably in a set of class and labor struggles taking place in St. Louis in the late 1870s. In 1877, the city would be so fundamentally altered by a general strike that, briefly, Americans from New York to California spoke of “the St. Louis commune.”

he labor strife underscored the need for solidarity among white and Black workers, as American capital consolidated and liberal Republicans began to retreat from the egalitarian promise of Reconstruction during the Gilded Age. A key strength of Johnson’s work is his reminder that even as the Great Compromise of 1877 brought Reconstruction to a formal end in the South, class conflict threatened to tear the nation apart again—and as was the case in the Civil War era, St. Louis was at the forefront of this bitter struggle.

The St. Louis general strike of 1877 actually began with strikes in Martinsburg, W.Va., by railway workers angered by, among other things, their terrible working conditions. The strikes soon spread along the rail lines to major cities across the nation. It was in St. Louis, however, that they reached their radical apogee. To achieve this extraordinary moment of radicalized power, Black and white workers joined forces to fight for their rights as laborers. This was revolutionary in itself, considering that many German Americans had already thrown in the towel on the struggle for Black voting rights during the recent Reconstruction period. This historic moment in St. Louis came after years of organizing by German American radicals, abolitionists, and African Americans in the region. Organizations like the Workingmen’s Party led rallies in the city—and yet they too found themselves not radical enough for the moment. Johnson recounts the election of a committee of laborers to meet with the mayor about the crisis; one of them was a Black man known to history only as Wilson. The Workingmen’s Party, Johnson writes, “was being led by the exigency of the moment and the logic of its own rhetoric toward a revolutionary alliance with the Black workers of St. Louis.”

The national media was both appalled by and dismissive of the biracial labor coalition that had formed in St. Louis. Even among some of the strike’s white leaders, Johnson writes, there was surprise at the prominent role their Black comrades played in the movement, creating a rare moment “of interracial working-class solidarity being made plain in the streets.”

Sadly, the eventual collapse of the St. Louis general strike was—like Schurz’s turn to liberal Republicanism and Weydemeyer’s sudden death—a harbinger of the lost opportunities for radicals across the nation. The strike leaders decided to end the outdoor meetings to regain control over the turn of events but found that they had instead “surrendered control of the streets to the police” who then broke up the strike with the Army. Once again, in St. Louis and the country as a whole, a moment for revolutionary change had ended in defeat.

istorians like Heather Cox Richardson, Eric Foner, Richard White, Manisha Sinha, and others have argued for the importance of tying together Reconstruction, westward expansion, and the Gilded Age. After all, they occurred in the same period and were certainly related in the minds the people living at that time. But Johnson reminds us how all three converged in St. Louis—and how they left a lasting imprint on the city.

After the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of the St. Louis commune, the city continued to serve as the central depot for America’s wars against Indigenous people in the West. By the turn of the 20th century, St. Louis’s remained central in American life—geographically, politically, and culturally—even after its periods of radical possibility had passed. At that point, it had already become the capital of ragtime music—“the soundtrack of the emergence of modern African American urban culture,” Johnson writes. Theodore Dreiser used the city to represent the social ills of urban life in a country that was rapidly industrializing and modernizing. And in recognition of its growing cultural significance, St. Louis became the site of the 1904 World’s Fair.

The fair gave the city’s fathers the opportunity to showcase St. Louis to the world. Yet what they showcased was not a city of radical possibility and cultural creativity, but rather one of urban modernity, laced with racism and white supremacy, in all its industrial and technological splendor. Inadvertently, the fair gave the world a view onto modern American capitalism itself. St. Louis’s drive to become a great city—one built on weak government, rampant racism, and deepening class tensions—exemplified the United States at the turn of the 20th century. As Johnson notes, the fair proved to be an ingathering “of professional racists, keepers of human zoos, and Western civilizational luminaries.” A decade before World War I, the technological dreams of Western society were difficult to separate from the racist nightmares being dreamed up by America’s elite—and once again, these converging realities were on ample display in St. Louis.

The fear of interracial solidarity and social democracy was a major presence in the minds of much of America’s elite during the Gilded Age and the early Jim Crow years. The World’s Fair reflected this fear. “There was no room at the fair,” Johnson writes, “for a story about African American racial progress.” The fair’s expositions served as a cultural battleground over the place of racism in American society, with white supremacy almost always winning out. The fairgrounds were filled with segregated restaurants and included a tribute to the enslavement of Black Americans called “the Old Plantation.”

The fair’s racism was a portent of the worsening racial divide in the city and its surrounding area. In 1917, white residents of East St. Louis, a city just across the Illinois border that was becoming an industrial powerhouse in its own right, attacked their Black counterparts in a stunning example of early-20th-century anti-Black violence, one that left anywhere from 39 to over 200 Black Americans dead and drove more than 5,000 from their homes. The events in the summer of 1917 became known as the East St. Louis Massacre. Serving as a prelude to the wave of anti-Black pogroms that would take place in the country in the coming years, the massacre gained international attention—a considerable feat given that World War I was still raging. “This was an attack not just on Black voters or Black workers or Black migrants or Black ‘gun-toters,’ ” Johnson writes; “it was an attack on Black families, on women and children, on the fabric of Black domestic life, on Black houses and bedsteads and photographs and pianos and phonographs and bric-a-brac, on Black wealth as much as Black labor.” The white citizens of East St. Louis did their best to make the Black community feel unwelcome, and they succeeded beyond their wildest, cruelest dreams.

Yet even amid such oppression, the dream of a multiracial industrial and social democracy lingered in the consciousness of the city’s residents. During the bleak years of the Depression, communists worked side by side with Black activists in St. Louis to fight for economic justice—anticipating, as Johnson notes, the broader national context in which the radicals of the ’30s and ’40s laid the foundations for the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s. It is no coincidence that Black radicals like C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, and William H. Patterson went to St. Louis to see this energized freedom movement in person—“not because they thought working-class Black people in the Midwest needed their guidance,” Johnson writes, “but because they wanted to find out what working-class Black people in the Midwest were doing and learn from them.”

Once again, however, the dream of interracial solidarity proved vulnerable to reactionary attack, as the anti-communist backlash forced the movement to go underground in many ways. But another complicating factor was the inability of radicals—Black and white—to truly connect with the city’s Black residents. As Johnson notes, though the communists had some success in organizing Black workers, they struggled to transform these bonds into a movement for radical change.

The failure to create lasting institutions was a problem not just in St. Louis, though a victory there could have made a crucial difference in the fight for industrial democracy and civil rights during the 1930s and ’40s. Homegrown Black communists like Hershel Walker were well aware of this failure. “We should have left them where they were,” he said—meaning that he and his fellow organizers should have focused on the day-to-day experiences and needs of Black workers in St. Louis instead of trying to transform them into communists.

he St. Louis we know today provides a sobering conclusion to the story Johnson tells. The city continues to be riven by racial and class injustice, and Johnson traces these divisions, in part, to all those missed opportunities. With the collapse of the left in the city, the right was emboldened to make its presence felt and to reshape St. Louis in its image. Far-right activist Gerald L. K. Smith published his long-running Christian nationalist magazine, The Cross and the Flag, there from 1942 to 1977. Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Buchanan, two stalwarts of the modern right who often served as a bridge between the far-right beliefs of Smith and his ilk and the more respectable conservatism of the Republican Party, both had their political start in St. Louis.

The use of military equipment and tactics by the police, not to mention their ever-present antagonism toward Black Americans, also have some roots in St. Louis, where the police have long viewed Black residents as the enemy. Starting in the late 1950s, St. Louis cops often referred to the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, with their predominantly Black residents, as “Korea,” and many of these officers were veterans of that “forgotten war.” The corroded relationship between the police and residents still prevails today. In a 2015 report, the Justice Department under President Obama found “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct” by the cops in the Greater St. Louis city of Ferguson, including extensive violations of “the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.” St. Louis began its life as a military installation intended to push Indigenous people from the American West. Today it serves as a continual reminder of the attempts to deprive Black Americans of any and every shred of equal citizenship, often by force.

But as Johnson stresses, the rise of conservative politics in St. Louis was accompanied by a revitalized radicalism. Out of the death of Michael Brown and the organized resistance to the long history of police brutality in Ferguson emerged one of the pillars of the Black Lives Matter movement. This movement brought to the fore a truth that most Americans have refused to deal with in the first two decades of the 21st century: that Black and Indigenous people in the United States, generations after the heyday of the civil rights and Black Power eras, still lag behind everyone else in the country in terms of almost every health and social marker. That the movement has also pushed the American left to think critically about the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation has been a boon to grassroots activists, who have struggled to make this very point for years.

St. Louis, though it is no longer a city on the rise, remains a mirror of American political life—both its possibilities and its grim realities. A seat of imperial expansion in the 19th century, the city is also rich in radical history, a place where Ferguson activist Cori Bush could win a seat in Congress. St. Louis, as Johnson reminds us, not only represents the worst of American racism; it also remains a beacon illuminating the possibility of a different America. As we begin to grapple with a new age in American politics—one with Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, in the White House—we might look to the example of radical St. Louis for lessons on how to rise above our country’s reactionary and racist heritage.

In 1975, The New York Times ran a previously “unpublished fragment of fiction” by Catch-22 author Joseph Heller on the federal government’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. Written in the 1960s, Heller’s lament for King was a brief but powerful swan song for what the United States had been and what it had become by the height of the Cold War. “This tapping and bugging of Martin Luther King was carried out by salaried employees on instructions from their supervisors, who were also salaried government employees, with the knowledge and consent of some very distinguished people in high public office, not one of whom, it seems, has yet been executed for this trespass, or even imprisoned, discharged, demoted, or censured,” Heller said. “This is called national defense.” The disgust felt by Heller was shared by many within the civil rights movement who were convinced that King was being surveilled. The full extent of this surveillance is still only shakily known.

King’s tortured relationship with the FBI is the subject of the new documentary MLK/FBI. Directed by Sam Pollard, it offers a comprehensive overview of how the FBI targeted King during his years of activism. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, saw King as a major domestic security threat, treating—as so many other Americans did—the demand for freedom and justice for African Americans as little more than a communist plot to destroy the United States. But as the documentary evolves, it becomes more than just a chronicle of King’s years under the watchful eye of the FBI. It also tells the story of the so-called American century, a century in which left-wing radicals and activists of color, at home and abroad, were harassed, surveilled, and imprisoned under the banner of preserving liberal democracy.

King himself was far from the first African American leader to be closely monitored by the FBI. Hoover’s obsession with breaking the back of American radicalism led him to keep close tabs on members of civil rights, Black nationalist, socialist, and communist organizations from the 1920s until his death in the early 1970s. In 1919, the Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor of the FBI, released Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes as Reflected in their Publications, which was a primer on African American resistance to segregation and oppression through arts and letters. The bureau referred to it, according to an excerpt published in The New York Times, as an opportunity to show their “radical opposition to the Government, and to the established rule of law and order.” The document itself names numerous periodicals and organizations, in the process casting a wide net across the entire spectrum of African American thought and cultural activity in the era of the Great War and the Red Summer of 1919. Rival publications such as The Negro World, the organ of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association, and A. Philip Randolph’s The Messenger were both cited as examples of the ferment of radical Black thought and cause for the FBI to expand its surveillance efforts.

The surveillance of King was merely the latest example of the FBI’s fears of African American resistance in the United States. Black radicals such as Claudia Jones were chief targets during the Cold War, as their anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric became increasingly unpalatable to an American government locked in ideological combat with the Soviet Union and literal warfare with communist regimes in Korea and Indochina. The FBI’s online database of collected materials on Jones and many other Americans is a digitized monument to both the bureau’s desperation to fight what it saw as an internal enemy and the gargantuan odds against which activists and intellectuals fought throughout the 20th century.

MLK/FBI works best when it situates the long-running saga between King and the federal government as part of a larger, and longer, pattern common to much of the “American century.” From Hoover’s battle against the Black freedom struggle to his dogged quest against radical and communist organizations in the United States, he and the FBI were only one flank in a long-standing war against those in the United States—and those outside it too—who were seeking to expand the meanings of freedom and equality in the modern world. Ironically, this was often done under the claims of helping protect liberal democracy, but it often meant the very opposite. The very American leaders proclaiming that the nation was the chief defender of freedom, democracy, and all the central precepts of liberal democracy were the ones routinely flouting them at home.

The documentary is a welcome addition to the growing canon of documentaries, movies, and specials on the life of King that attempt to move away from the public, cuddly version of the man and toward a more nuanced portrayal of him and his life. It engages directly with King’s personal failures, along with the contempt he was held in by many leading Americans. But it also offers a less cuddly version of the United States. Along with films like King in the Wilderness and Citizen King, MLK/FBI reminds us how deeply unpopular King was during his life. Indeed, MLK/FBI’s most startling revelation may be just how popular J. Edgar Hoover was, at least in comparison with a man who now has a national holiday to commemorate his birthday.

The files of King’s life will not be fully unsealed by the FBI until February 2027, and the film ends by asking historians whether the release of those files, which include salacious details of his personal life, will change how he is perceived by the public. But the greater question may be whether this will force the federal government—and the American people—to face the sordid history of surveillance of radical “subversive” groups that, many years later, are lionized for their heroism.

In May of 1969, Ebony magazine ran a profile of Julian Bond, the activist and civil rights leader who had recently been reelected to the Georgia House of Representatives. With the United States mere weeks away from putting a man on the moon and the war in Vietnam still raging, the magazine wanted to take stock of where Black America found itself at the end of the decade. It was a moment of both retrospection about the civil rights movement and excitement about what the future held for African American politics. Yet Bond had been fighting for freedom and justice for more than a decade, and it showed. Ebony’s David Llorens wrote, “Attractive cat that he is, Julian Bond looks tired.”1

The profile sought to examine what it meant for a radical stalwart, struggling against a broken system from the outside, to become a politician struggling to effect change from within it. Bond’s shift “from protest to politics,” as Bayard Rustin put it in an article earlier in the decade, was a measure of how far the movement had changed Southern society. That Bond was one of the first Black people to serve in the Georgia legislature generations after Reconstruction was also a measure of how much further the nation as a whole had to go.2

After describing Bond’s work as a state representative, his speaking tours at colleges, and his deepening involvement in the Democratic Party as its New Deal coalition started to unravel, Llorens moved on to discuss the twin pillars of pride and ambivalence that supported Bond’s new role. These were the same pillars that held up the aspirations and fears of so many African Americans in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement. As Llorens wrote, “Julian Bond, as a politician, represents hope for the freedom of black people,” but it was a hope “entirely dependent upon the possibility that white people are capable of a humane and non-racist America.” For Llorens, this hope was real and somewhat tangible. But as he noted at the end of the passage, it depended on a radical change in the thought and action of white Americans—something that in 1969 still appeared far off because of a continuation of the “backlash politics” that had defined American political, social, cultural, and intellectual discourse ever since Reconstruction.3

That mix of felt urgency and anxious uncertainty about how much change could be made in American society would define Bond’s efforts for much of his career. His time in office, like his time as an activist, would be characterized by both his hopes for greater social equality and the continuing need to fight for such change when these hopes were too often thwarted. This tension was central to nearly all of his writing, much of which is now collected in a new book, Race Man, edited by the historian Michael G. Long.4

Race Man captures the full output of Bond’s long and distinguished career, first as an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, then as a member of the Georgia legislature (in the House and later in the Senate), then as a traveling academic who taught about his experiences in the social upheavals of the ’60s, and finally as a writer and aging lion of the civil rights movement still fighting to hold on to the ideals of his youth. Along the way, the book also makes clear a set of themes and quandaries that have troubled so much of the history of the American left: What is lost in the movement from protest to politics? How can lasting change be achieved in the face of unsatisfying compromise? How can radicals and activists carry the torch of emancipation and equality in an age in which both major parties and many voters appear, at best, apathetic to meaningful change and, at worst, downright hostile to it?5

Bond’s years as an activist also offer a guide through the intellectual and political history of the left in the second half of the 20th century. As Long argues in his introduction, Bond’s importance to the history of the United States and the American left in particular is nearly impossible to overestimate today. Very few Americans, he writes, “had sought more consistently and doggedly to establish solid connections between the black civil rights movement and the many progressive movements it sometimes unpredictably inspired.”6

ulian Bond was born in 1940 in Nashville. His father, Horace Mann Bond, was the first president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia and later became the first Black president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, both historically Black institutions. While serving as a college president, Horace Bond participated in the intellectual ferment of the World War II and early Cold War years. He did considerable research to support the NAACP’s arguments in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954 and served as a prominent civil rights advocate during the period. The elder Bond’s participation in the rarefied world of African American educators and intellectuals meant that his son was exposed to many of the leaders of Black America from an early age. A famous image of Julian Bond as a young boy, for example, shows him side by side with the actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson. The photograph itself is a testament to the intergenerational links between the different civil rights cohorts.7

Yet Bond’s early exposure to the intellectual creativity and political activism of Black America would hardly shield him from the racism and violence spawned by white supremacy. In the Jim Crow South, Bond saw racism and discrimination all around him—a radicalizing experience that never left him, even after he and his family moved to Pennsylvania when his father became the head of Lincoln University. Bond’s growing politicization throughout the ’50s was only deepened by his years at the George School, a prep school founded by Quakers, where he began to develop his long-term fascination with pacifism.8

In 1957, Bond returned to Georgia to attend Morehouse College. Long a hotbed of Black struggle and uplift, the school helped launch his career in civil rights activism. He met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1960 while at Morehouse, and that year he cofounded, with fellow student Lonnie King, the Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights, which eventually led to his involvement in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Bond immediately understood the significance of SNCC and the role that students could play in expanding the civil rights movement. The younger generation of Black Americans was ready to use new tactics to fight for the kind of social change their parents and grandparents sought in previous eras. Reflecting on the rise of these new organizations, Bond wrote, “The struggle for human rights is a constant fight, and one which the students do not plan to relinquish until full equality is won for all men.”9

Against the backdrop of African nations declaring their independence abroad and civil rights agitation growing at home, 1960 saw a wave of sit-ins, starting in Greensboro, N.C. Four students at North Carolina A&T, a Black college, decided to stage a sit-in, adopting the tactics of nonviolent direct action already being used by various civil rights organizations. Word of the sit-ins spread across the South, spurring even more sit-ins as well as Bond’s participation in Atlanta. “Why don’t we make it happen here?” Lonnie King said to Bond in February 1960. That brief conversation, between two young men who yearned to be part of the great moral and political issue of their age, sparked Bond’s lifelong service to the movement.10

Bond participated in the sit-ins in Atlanta that year and in a whirlwind series of campaigns across the South as the communications director of SNCC. Leaving Morehouse to dedicate himself to this work full-time, Bond, like many other young Black Americans, accepted that he would have to relinquish the comforts of the college campus and risk life and limb in the fire of activism. At this time, he began to think in broader terms about the idea of human rights, looking beyond America’s shores to recognize the violence and oppression that the country inflicted on various peoples of color elsewhere—an internationalism that he would soon marry to his domestic egalitarianism.11

By the mid-’60s, after five years of working with SNCC, Bond began to grow frustrated. While he recognized the changing nature of struggle, he had always imagined SNCC as an organization that would embrace everyone, and he became worried about its increasingly separatist politics. “I didn’t like the direction it seemed to be taking,” he recalled, especially as SNCC embraced the idea of becoming an exclusively Black organization.12

Despite Bond’s ambivalence about SNCC’s separatist turn, the organization continued to exert a major influence on his life, especially with its anti-imperialist politics in the middle of the decade. SNCC denounced the Vietnam War, and Bond grew increasingly active in anti-war efforts. He also began to consider running for office. In early 1965, Rustin made his appeal to civil rights activists to turn “from protest to politics,” arguing that the problems they would continue to face, even after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, required more than demonstrations. By then, Bond was preparing a run for the Georgia House of Representatives, and he was joined by the many different strands of the Black freedom struggle—the mainstream civil rights movement, Black nationalists, and the growing number of African Americans active in the Democratic Party—that were also making the move.13

After his election, Bond found himself at a curious intersection of local, national, and international politics when the state House refused to seat him because he had endorsed SNCC’s anti-war stance. SNCC, Martin Luther King Jr., and other activists rallied to defend Bond’s right to represent his constituency in Atlanta. Eventually the Supreme Court ruled, 9–0, in Bond v. Floyd that his right to free speech had been violated by the state House’s vote to deny him a seat.14

After Bond became a legislator, he found that more of his peers were following in his footsteps. People like John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Jim Clyburn, after years in the streets demanding change, were now running for office as they sought to secure and extend the gains they had helped win. It seemed the logical next step, even if the change that could be achieved in state legislatures sometimes appeared small compared with what could be done at the federal level. And yet, as Llorens wrote in Ebony, that kind of work mattered as well: Basic services like streetlights, garbage removal, sewage, repairing roads, and draining water from flooded basements were “‘some of the things we need’ as Julian sees it, and he takes pride in being able to use his political weight to deliver them. ‘Those are things my constituents weren’t always able to get in the past,’ he says. Nor are most of his constituents, who…are victims of poverty, apt to forget the water removed or the street repaired.”15

he essays in Race Man nicely illustrate this trajectory from college activist to elected official (and beyond). Broken into 10 sections, the book traces Bond’s political formation throughout these periods of his life. The problems of white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, and misogyny were his fights throughout, even if they all changed shape. From the struggle against Jim Crow to the battle for LGBTQ rights, he remained convinced that it was necessary to agitate on behalf of the powerless outside the halls of power, but as he got older, he became convinced one had to do it from inside them as well. Whether as an activist struggling for voting rights or as a politician in the Georgia legislature redrawing district boundaries, Bond insisted that only through a combination of movements and policy could social change be achieved.16

Bond’s essays capture the intellectual world that inspired him and that he helped inspire in turn. Though dedicated to egalitarian politics, he often found himself in heated debate with other elements of the left. This was especially true in the late ’60s, as the hope of nonviolent civil disobedience peacefully changing American society began to buckle under the strain of Vietnam, the half-hearted War on Poverty, and the ever-present specter of white backlash. The rise of the Black power movement offered Bond and other civil rights activists a unique challenge: They embraced many key components of this more radical turn but also struggled to find their way among its constituency, one that increasingly seemed to view the gains they had won as limited and incomplete.17

Of course, in many ways those gains were incomplete, and reading Bond’s response to his more radical contemporaries, one can see that he might have missed how their militant spirit—not to mention their ability to continue to find common cause with social movements all over the world—helped, in the long run, to solidify the reforms he and his colleagues had won. An example of this is seen in his writings about South Africa and the growing movement to divest from the apartheid state, in which Bond sounded far more like his more radical peers. “There is an inseparable connection between black Africa and black America,” he argued in 1978 while participating in a protest against a Davis Cup match between the United States and South Africa in Nashville. This was not a coincidence: After all, Bond was also in pursuit of an equality far greater than the federal government was willing to offer, and the civil rights liberalism that their protest spawned was, in their view, only the beginning, not the end point. Likewise, Bond, who hewed steadfastly to pacifism early in his public life, also began to doubt, with his more radical colleagues, its efficacy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and while he lauded the achievements of the sit-ins, he came to recognize the clear limits of early civil rights activism. Indeed, that was one of the reasons he turned to electoral politics.18

Bond’s ambivalence about the growing radicalism of SNCC was also rooted in his desire for more concrete action. Intimately aware of the organization’s internal discord, he concluded that it had become mired at times in what he called “too much democracy” and a lack of decision-making by its leaders. He did not appear to question SNCC’s democratic goals, but he felt that by 1967 its leadership was no longer taking responsibility for the group’s decisions, in terms of both immediate tactics and long-term strategies.19

One policy change in particular frustrated him: the separatism that no longer sought to build a multiracial membership in SNCC. Bond opposed this separatism on principle as well as for practical reasons, writing in 1967 that it would lead to “near unanimous condemnation” and cause SNCC activists to narrow the scope of their activities, “effectively contained by their own unwillingness to trust the ‘outside world.’” For Bond, part of the lesson of the ’60s was that activism alone was not enough; one had to have a programmatic plan of action for both grassroots organizing and building political power in the face of rampant white backlash.20

nce in office, that was exactly what Bond attempted to do. He wanted to find a way around the dead end that movement politics appeared to face in the late ’60s and the political weaknesses of white liberal complacency in the early ’70s. While serving in the Georgia legislature, he amassed a national reputation, and by 1972, he began contributing serious ideas to the political ferment of that era.21

Bond participated in the discussions across the South that led to the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Ind. His criticism of both the American left and mainstream liberalism grew more pointed as the decade progressed, when he repeatedly expressed his deep ambivalence—if not outright hostility—toward the presidential campaign and then presidency of former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. “Southern Baptists are fond of saying that ‘prayer changes things,’” Bond wrote. “Jimmy Carter’s religiosity has certainly had that effect on him, in fact has changed him from left to right to center so many times that converts to the Carter cause ought to take a cue from an earlier apostle, Thomas, who doubted.” In the end, Bond was one of the few mainstream Black civil rights activists turned politicians who refused to back Carter during his 1976 run.22

For Bond, Carter’s candidacy—as well as his backing by so many prominent African Americans—was less a betrayal than a reminder of how weak the Black vote was as a bloc within or, if need be, outside the Democratic Party. “American politics has always been group politics,” Bond wrote in 1977, during the first year of Carter’s administration, and Black movements and politicians needed to embrace this fact and form a cohesive electoral faction.23

Bond’s arguments mirrored those put forth a decade earlier in the book Black Power by Charles V. Hamilton and the future Kwame Ture about the necessity for independent political action, now applied to electoral politics. And he was not wrong, either. During Reconstruction, Southern Black men formed the backbone of the Republican Party below the Mason-Dixon Line and thus wielded considerable power. During the New Deal era, both major parties sought Black voters while carefully trying to not antagonize pro-segregation white Southerners. In the ’70s, with the New Right on the rise and liberalism—as well as the broader ideas of social democracy—under threat across the Western world, Bond believed it was more urgent than ever for Black Americans to acquire sustained political power. “The sooner we realize the difference between elections and governing, the better able we’ll be to form ourselves into a political bloc,” he wrote.24

This came, ironically, after Bond argued in 1972 that “coalition politics always weakens at least one partner in the coalition rather than strengthens both partners” (a fear Hamilton and Ture also voiced). Such questions, of course, are still with us, especially concerning the direction of the Democratic Party and whether it has taken generations of Black voters for granted.25

ne of the advantages of Race Man is that instead of shuffling Bond’s writings together by theme, Long presents them in chronological order so we can chart Bond’s evolution as well as his consistency. We can see his thinking change over time on a wide variety of topics—sometimes dramatically—and while we can see the shifts in his tactics and strategies, we also see just how consistent his principles remained. However, the book’s chronological structure slightly overdetermines Bond’s changes: We lose sight of the complicated nature of the broader civil rights and Black power movements, and at times it can be difficult to situate his arguments in the context of national politics and international tumult. From almost the outset of his career, Bond was writing from within the milieu of a Black freedom movement that inspired and was inspired by other movements in pursuit of freedom, justice, and equality elsewhere in the world.26

This is why Bond’s seamless movement from domestic campaigns to international policy mirrored a broader awareness among Black Americans of the need to get more involved in global affairs. It was also why there were sometimes moments of fierce friction, as displayed in the arguments Bond had in the ’70s with the growing environmental movement. Pleading with its champions to look past a narrow politics of conservation and local resistance, he insisted, much like climate change activists today, that “environmental pollution is only a symptom of the moral and political pollution at its core…. Long before industrial filth fouled the rivers, lakes, and air of this continent, the bitter salt of slaves’ sweat and tears soured the [once] fertile soil and the blood of noble red men soaked the fields and plains.”27

Bond’s insistence that the environmental movement’s rhetoric about a ticking “population bomb” was equally misguided anticipated the birth of a more diverse and robust movement that sought to think more systemically about environmental problems. The growth of the environmental justice movement in the ’70s and ’80s—a Blacker, poorer relative of the better-known movement that spawned Earth Day in 1970—ameliorated Bond’s fears by tapping into long-held concerns by Black Americans and others about the relationships between racism, land ownership, and environmental waste. This more sophisticated environmentalism also drew Bond into its movement, and he got arrested in 2013 at the White House while protesting the Keystone XL pipeline alongside members of the Sierra Club and in defiance of the nation’s first Black president.28

Bond was likewise concerned about a growing disconnect between activists and ordinary people in the 1970s. As Black power gave way to a Black liberalism safely ensconced in the Democratic Party, he continued to wonder if activists had lost their way. “It suggests that the supposed and alleged security of the college campus is not the proper place from which to engage in social criticism of people who seldom see any book but the Bible from year to year,” he warned, critiquing what he saw as an activism that had become too comfortable in the ivory tower, far removed from the everyday needs of working people.29

y the late ’70s and early ’80s, Bond had become, for many Americans, an avatar of the civil rights movement and its legacy. He lent his voice to the groundbreaking miniseries Eyes 
on the Prize, serving as a one-man Greek chorus for the now-iconic struggle. He hosted an early episode of Saturday Night Live, cementing his status as a national public figure. But there was an increasing sense that Bond had failed to live up to his early promise on the political stage and that as his celebrity grew, so did his distance from his constituents in Georgia. In a bruising 1986 race for the US House of Representatives that pitted him against his friend and colleague from the civil rights movement John Lewis, Bond was criticized for having lost his way. Rumors that he used drugs were whispered about in Atlanta and were blown wide open when Lewis challenged him to a drug test. “I love Julian like a brother,” Lewis said in a 1990 profile of the two men in Atlanta magazine. “But he fumbled the ball. He had unbelievable opportunities. He just didn’t take advantage.”30

Part of what hurt Bond’s campaign, as The New York Times pointed out after his defeat, was the concern that his “thousands of speaking engagements and television appearances elsewhere” hampered his ability to be an effective voice in the Georgia Senate. That lost him the trust and goodwill he needed to win what turned out to be his toughest—and final—political campaign. After the election, Bond accepted teaching positions at several distinguished institutions, including Harvard and American University, and he reflected on the charge that he had failed to live up to his potential as the man who could have been the nation’s first Black vice president, perhaps even its first Black president. “I can’t do what other people want me to do,” he said. “I’m absolutely content and fulfilled right now [teaching and lecturing]. It’s enough for me. I’m confused as to why it’s not enough for anyone else.”31

Bond remained active in left political circles for the rest of his life, and he continued to consider how one could be radical and yet work within the system, sounding the alarm during George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s presidencies on a range of issues, especially the erosion of voting rights and the need to fight for LGBTQ rights.32

It is difficult to imagine a thorough history of the American left after 1960 that doesn’t include Bond and the many roles he played: as a communications director for SNCC, as a state legislator for 20 years, as the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center (a position he assumed in 1971), as the voice that millions of people associated with the civil rights movement thanks to Eyes on the Prize, and as an elder statesman of the movement before his death in 2015. His balancing act between radicalism and reform, between movements and party politics, still speaks to the divides and the cohesiveness of the left. Fighting for freedom in the streets, in the classrooms, and in the halls of power was all part of Bond’s tool kit. Reading his essays, we are reminded that the challenges of forging a principled yet practical path forward are nothing new—and that Bond is someone who might serve as a guide in our own uncertain times. We cannot be afraid of difficult debates or of changing tactics when necessary. Julian Bond proved that, time and time again.33

his is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly.” W.E.B. Du Bois delivered these lines before a large crowd in Columbia, S.C., in the fall of 1946. The people gathered before him were neither strictly Marxist nor communist; they were mostly members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which was founded in 1937 to organize young people, workers, and other disaffected groups across the South. But no one in that audience was shocked by what he had to say. For them, like Du Bois, breaking the back of Southern white supremacy required challenging and remaking the larger system of exploitative capitalism that had subjected black and white Southerners to centuries of injustice. With the Congress of Industrial Organizations executing its Operation Dixie to organize industrial workers in the South that year and with African American veterans back from the war embarking on their own militant and heroic struggle for human rights there, Du Bois’s insistence that the South had become the center of a new battle for freedom was in no way far from the truth.

Part of the reason for this was that the struggle for civil rights and racial equality in the South had long been linked to activity in the economic sphere, where millions of white and black Southerners worked as sharecroppers and factory employees and in various low-wage jobs. During the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the region the “nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” and there had always been an undercurrent of Southern-based radicalism that sought wide-ranging change—not only civil and political rights but also economic and social ones.

To add to this, beginning in the 1930s, many of the leaders and organizers in the struggle against segregation and Jim Crow were members of the Communist Party or its fellow travelers. From Harlem in New York City to Birmingham, Ala., black and white Communists organized across racial and class lines throughout the Great Depression and World War II to fight fascism abroad and hunger and racism at home. By the time the Southern Negro Youth Congress was organized, many involved in the burgeoning civil rights movement had been active in earlier Communist and Communist-affiliated groups. Others who were radicalized by the trial of the Scottsboro Boys and the Angelo Herndon case were exposed to many radical economic ideas and felt a particular loyalty to the left, having witnessed in both trials the Communist Party backing lawyers to take up the cause of black civil and legal rights in the South.

So when Du Bois spoke before a crowd of young black activists in the mid-1940s, he was preaching to the choir, because an ever-growing number of radical Southerners already agreed with him that the struggle against white supremacy was a struggle against capitalism, too. As Du Bois told them, the “first and greatest…allies are the white working classes about you,” which had also been exploited by wealthy capitalists interested in dividing the South’s working class.

Mary Stanton’s new book, Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950, helps recover this history through the story of one of the party’s most important sections: District 17, a regional unit of the national party that was headquartered in industrial Birmingham and sought to coordinate efforts to organize white and black Southerners in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. During the Depression, World War II, and the early postwar years, the group was at the forefront of the struggle throughout the Deep South against police brutality, lynchings, and anti-free-speech laws. In terms of the number of members, it often punched above its weight: James S. Allen, a Communist organizer who wrote the memoir Organizing in the Depression South, estimated that in 1931 the party had fewer than 500 members in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. By chronicling the party’s successful efforts to establish a foothold in Alabama during the 1930s and ’40s, Stanton shows us that Communist organizers adopted a variety of organizing tools and resources—including the International Labor Defense (ILD), the American section of the Comintern’s legal arm—in order to win black Americans their rights and freedom in court. Highlighting how these black and white Communists built a multiracial movement through a series of highly publicized trials, Stanton illuminates how Communists in Alabama and elsewhere in the United States used the law not only to bring international attention to the worst of Jim Crow segregation but also to build solidarity across race and class lines. By doing the hard work of pursuing a legal strategy closely tied to a media strategy of publicizing numerous social injustices, Alabama Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early ’50s.

ased primarily in Northern cities, the Communist Party started to plan its organizing campaign in the South in the early 1930s, a new view of the South as a key area of activism that Harry Haywood, a prominent black Communist based in Chicago, promulgated in The Communist in his 1933 essay “The Struggle for the Leninist Position on the Negro Question in the United States.” His 1948 book Negro Liberation insisted, among other things, that American radicals needed to turn their attention to the fight for black political and economic rights in the so-called Black Belt, the fertile land sweeping south from Virginia through the heart of the former Confederacy to Louisiana. There “a nation within a nation” stood, and Communists, Haywood argued, could join in its struggle for self-determination—and by doing so build a base for revolution.

Haywood’s arguments made a profound impression on his fellow Communists, both black and white, in the North. He first came across this idea while living in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and seeing the autonomous republics within the USSR, which provided a model for what he desired for African Americans in the South. The Depression only sharpened this insight. Hoping to expand the party’s membership and reach in the rest of the United States, Haywood saw an opportunity to do just that by organizing the South.

However, as the Communist organizers arrived in different Southern cities, they found that they had to make changes on the fly to the idea Haywood promoted. As Stanton tells us, many of the black sharecroppers, miners, and industrial workers they encountered did not want to opt out of the system but rather to opt into it: They wanted “to participate in the nation’s prosperity, to claim constitutional guarantees, and to assume a rightful place in society.” This discovery left a profound mark on early Communist organizers and shaped much of the work they did in the South and in the North as well. Instead of focusing on an all-out revolution against Jim Crow’s entrenched segregation, they sought to help black Americans win their economic, political, and legal rights. Rather than a violent overthrow of the system, they mostly attempted to use various means of protest to win major victories on behalf of social and political reform.

Nationally, the Communists accepted this Popular Front approach, seeking to pursue social justice in all of its manifestations, and the experience of the Alabama Communists played an important role in shaping this evolution in American Communist thinking and in helping the party, as its vanguard, test the applications of this new approach. The Alabama Communist Party, after all, made up a considerable part of District 17. The threats these activists and their allies faced were stark. Even at the height of its popularity during the Great Depression, it was risky being a member of the Communist Party anywhere in the country, and organizing for civil rights and economic reform in Alabama was an even more dangerous prospect. District 17 became ground zero for the new reformism that ran through the party. Communists there could become active in both civil rights and labor organizing; they could reach out to black and white Southerners alike, form trade unions, and provide them with legal defense. As a result, they were a constant target of harassment and beatings, so much so that Stanton compares District 17 to “a firehouse—in a perennial state of emergency, running on adrenalin.”

tanton begins Red, Black, White with the infamous Scottsboro Boys trial. In 1931, nine young African American men were accused by two white women of raping them while they rode on a train traveling through Tennessee and Alabama. The NAACP was initially reluctant to take the case, so the ILD rushed to the Scottsboro Boys’ defense. The case soon rocketed to international prominence, primarily because of the unrelenting efforts of local Communist activists and the ILD’s skillful use of publicity. Eventually, the state gave posthumous pardons to several of the young men—Ozie Powell, Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems, Andy Wright.

The achievements of the ILD helped the Communist Party build some support among African Americans across the country, and Stanton traces how Communist organizers in Birmingham and the rest of District 17 used it to fuel activist campaigns throughout the Deep South. Even with the ILD’s organizing, however, the Birmingham organizers struggled to craft a party structure that was able to withstand the heat of the anti-communism and anti-black racism that pervaded Alabama’s political system in the 1930s and ’40s. The party organization that had been developed in the North proved important in supporting the party’s efforts in the South. Faced with laws explicitly designed to crack down on radical organizing, the national party sent lawyers to defend the organizers and helped publicize their cases. But District 17 often found that it had to innovate its own tactics: investigating the lynchings and other murders of African Americans in the state, organizing local sharecropper unions and a reading group, and enlisting sympathetic local lawyers.

Stanton also discusses District 17’s attempts to investigate police brutality in cities like Memphis in the 1930s. The hostility that the Communist organizers faced was attributable to their radical stance on racial equality as well as to their attempts to organize Southern workers. They were operating in a one-party system that constantly monitored and suppressed all forms of radical organizing, and the ghosts of the past haunted their work. In 1919 in Elaine, Ark., radicals were victims of the Red Summer racial pogrom sparked by attempts to organize black sharecroppers.

The struggles of union workers in Gastonia, N.C., in 1929 and the collapse of the textile workers’ strike in 1934 likewise showed how hostile Southern authorities were to any labor organizing, and many Communists there were forced to try a variety of tactics untested in the North. Often stretched thin trying to help out wherever they could, they ended up having to live in a state of what Stanton calls “mind-numbing fear,” but they nonetheless persevered and helped thousands in the American South make their desires for freedom known across the world.

hile offering us a close view of local organizing, Stanton never loses sight of the larger story of American communism. She also situates District 17’s activism within a larger history of radical activism and protest in the Deep South that helped plant the seeds for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. The members of District 17 and the people they served recognized that theirs was but a local phase of a much broader worldwide struggle against not just fascism but all forms of imperialist and racist domination. Du Bois was not alone in making the connections between local struggles against Jim Crow and international struggles against capitalism. Black Southerners defended Ethiopia after it was invaded by Italy in 1935 and journeyed to Spain to fight Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. They all saw their fight as the same one, against the same enemy, on multiple fronts.

As Stanton shows near the end of the book, the forces of reaction in the South were aware of this larger struggle, too, even as their attempts to crush the Communists and drive back interracial organizing became more successful in the postwar years, when Northerners and Southerners alike targeted labor and socialist organizers across the country, essentially forcing the left underground. The Second Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s dealt some severe blows, but the Communist Party left a legacy of grassroots organizing and agitation that would become part of the broader civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

Other books have covered at least a portion of this terrain before. Robin D.G. Kelley’s landmark Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression is the best-known work on the party’s operations in Alabama in this period. Glenda Gilmore’s Defying Dixie, John Egerton’s Speak Now Against the Day, and Patricia Sullivan’s Days of Hope also note that the fight against Jim Crow did not begin with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Taken together, these books tell a rich story that is often neglected or minimized in the mainstream narratives of Southern history. By excavating the roots of civil rights activism in the South that reach back to the 1930s, they remind us that the struggle for political and civil rights there was almost always twinned with the struggle for economic and social rights.

The role that Communists played in the civil rights movement of the postwar years is often suppressed or glossed over, if mentioned at all. Red, Black, White prompts us to remember a different Southern past, and Stanton shows us the more practical and down-to-earth nature of Communist organizing in the South as well. The party’s activists arrived in the region with an ideological view of class struggle but adapted their tactics and strategy after listening to people on the ground. “Pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will” is the memorable phrase coined by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, but it could just as easily have been uttered by Alabama’s Communists, both those from the South and those who traveled there to help organize it. These Communists risked nearly everything, and they did so knowing full well that their ideals might never be realized in their lifetimes. But they nonetheless persisted. Whether trying to save someone from lynching or struggling to organize workers in a Birmingham steel plant, it was, for nearly all of them, a matter of life or death.

Works on the history of African Americans in the conservative movement have become increasingly prominent in recent years. Leah Wright Rigueur’s The Loneliness of the Black Republican, Joshua Farrington’s Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP, and Corey D. Fields’s Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans are just a few recent examples in a growing trend of historians and political scientists taking seriously the long history of African Americans in the conservative movement. Corey Robin’s latest book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, attempts to do the same by exclusively focusing on arguably the most powerful African American in the nation today.

Robin, the writer of previous works on American politics like Fear: The History of a Political Idea (2004) and The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011), argues that Thomas’s embrace of black nationalism in the 1960s and ’70s is central to understanding his conservatism. Black nationalism wasn’t something that Thomas discarded on his road to the right; instead, its “fusion of solidarity and separatism, of collective self-reliance and self-help” continues to exert a powerful influence on his thinking and jurisprudence today. Robin spoke with The Nation about Thomas’s political and intellectual trajectory and about his own work on the history of conservative ideas. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

—Robert Greene II

Robert Greene II: Why were you driven to write this book? How does it relate to your other works?

Corey Robin: It was by accident. Two political scientists, Melvin Rogers and Jack Turner, were preparing an anthology of essays on African American political thought about six or seven years ago. They were asking various scholars to write different chapters on all the canonical figures. They felt there was a real absence of representation of black conservative voices, and they wanted someone to do something on Clarence Thomas.

Initially, I was reluctant to do it, as I felt I was done thinking and writing about the right. But the second I began work on it, I was transfixed by this man. Part of it was the biography—I knew very little about his life. But far more fascinating for me was the personality of his writings. Supreme Court opinions tend to be impersonal and dry as dust, but Thomas’s writings weren’t like that—they grab you and don’t let go. His voice is so filled with contradiction and conviction. The more I read, the more I was pulled in by his world. So this book isn’t just about one man—it’s really about America, writ large, in a lot of ways.

RG: How does this book relate, if at all, to your two previous works—on fear as a political idea and on conservatism as a political idea?

CR: It definitely relates to my book on conservatism, The Reactionary Mind—though I do feel that some of the people who’ve championed it, the defenders of that book, have slightly misread it. Both its critics and its defenders see the argument in The Reactionary Mind as simply that conservative ideas are irrelevant, that conservatism is a reflexive defense of hierarchical power. That wasn’t the book’s argument; it was about ideas in defense of hierarchies of power. There is, at the heart of conservatism, a type of heroic vision: Human excellence is demonstrated under conditions of tremendous exigency. Thomas is indebted to that idea of human greatness, and that underlies the synthesis of conservatism and black nationalism that he advances.

RG: How do you define “black nationalism” in The Enigma of Clarence Thomas? I think most people would blanch at a description of Thomas as that.

CR: The assumption many people have about black nationalism is that it automatically has a left valence. But we know, historiographically, that’s not true: Black nationalism has a range of political valences. For example, William Jeremiah Moses’s The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925, begins precisely with that point—that historically, during its heyday, black nationalism was quite conservative. Now, that’s not my argument, but I think it’s important to remember that black nationalism as an ideology doesn’t map neatly onto the right-left divide. At its core, there is a belief that the fate of black people in this country is irreparably separate from the fate of white people and that the larger polity cannot accommodate black fate or aspirations. Some black nationalists favor the creation of a sovereign state; others have argued in favor of emigration. Often what it has meant is some kind of aspiration to autonomy and some form of separation apart from white people.

One book that influenced me, Dean Robinson’s Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought, argues that the shape and form of black nationalism during any time period reflects larger currents of culture and politics. Black nationalism is not hermetically sealed from other parts of American politics and culture. So the black nationalism that has such an effect on Clarence Thomas in the late 1960s and early 1970s is not going to look the same as other moments of black nationalism.

Thomas began as a serious black nationalist on the left during his time at Holy Cross. There he developed a lot of the convictions and commitments that survive his shift to the right. Journalists and some biographers have known Thomas had this past—but the assumption was that he gave it all up, that it was a marginal moment in his life. I found just the opposite. Despite his shift to the right between 1975 and 1990, when President George H.W. Bush names him to the court of appeals as a political actor and a judge, it survives. It’s important to understand that these commitments survive his political changes in the mid-1970s.

RG: How important do you think the 1970s are to understanding our overall situation as a nation, including, of course, the question of race?

CR:: The historiography of the 1970s is a fascinating field. The defining characteristic of the ’70s was unsettlement. The outcome of the decade was undetermined—no one knew where things were going. The standard view of black leftists and Black Power movements is that everyone was staunchly anti-capitalist or Afro-Marxist. I was heavily influenced by several books, including The Business of Black Power, by Julia Rabig and Laura Warren Hill, a fantastic book that I recommend to people about all the ways that Black Power activists occupied this position of unsettlement, experimenting with different economic forms, including capitalism.

At the time, there was also a strong sense of political deceleration. Even at the height of Black Power, black participation in protest politics was not what it was during the earlier days of the civil rights movement. There was also an increasing dissatisfaction with black leaders. Many black activists took an economic turn and a turn away from politics, whether it was electoral politics or radical activism. Thomas was in that milieu. By 1975, when he reads Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics, the seeds have been sown for this right turn. This reminds me of a quote from an Amiri Baraka essay, where he says about that period when a new kind of black conservatism was gestating that “there were pods growing in our cellars”—in other words, the seeds of black conservatism were growing in the midst of black activism.

RG: Would it be a stretch to say the presence of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court is, arguably, one of lasting legacies of Thomas Sowell’s writings?

CR: Not a stretch at all. Intellectual influences and inspirations are an interesting and complicated question. Sowell brought it all together for Thomas. If you read Sowell’s book carefully, there’s a fascinating through line there—that there was one force in American history that white men couldn’t control, and that was the market itself.

What’s interesting here is that Thomas, in the 1970s, becomes familiar with debates over capitalism and slavery. He was certainly familiar with works by historians like Eugene Genovese and Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman. Thomas himself often reads history—for instance, he recently cited, extensively, Eric Foner’s work on the Reconstruction period in a court opinion. To go back to Sowell: In Race and Economics, he argued, similar to Fogel and Engerman, that the market placed serious restraints on treatment of the enslaved. Now, that is an argument that many more recent historians categorically reject, but we need to recognize Sowell as a force who brought different elements of thinking together—capitalism, black nationalism, conservatism—for Thomas.

RG: In your book, you write about a “Black Constitution”—one that originates in the Reconstruction era—and a “White Constitution,” from the antebellum period. How do these two Constitutions coexist in the legal mind of Clarence Thomas?

CR:: First we need to ask: What is a Constitution? Often we think of it as a fundamental code of laws; this is a modern idea. However, there is the older idea of a Constitution: that it is less a code of law or legal system and much more about the structure of a society, of the social order as a whole. This definition played a role in Thomas’s formation in the 1980s, via his influences at the time from Straussian intellectuals.

At the heart of Thomas’s vision of society is the role of black men. For him, black men are extraordinarily potent and important figures—they are the pillar of black society. At the heart of both Constitutions for Thomas is the fate of black men. Now, Thomas is distinctive among many originalists in that he takes the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution seriously. He sees them as a second Constitution. The question of black people and their transformation is at the heart of that second Constitution. For Clarence Thomas, the fundamental freedom guaranteed by Emancipation—aside from the fact of emancipation itself—is the right to bear arms. He has this long opinion in McDonald v. Chicago in which he rereads the history of the Second Amendment through the struggle over slavery, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, and that this was the centerpiece of what was won for black men: the right to defend themselves and their families. As a result, not only is the black man—in the Black Constitution—a figure of authority, but he’s a particular kind of authority: a protector with a gun.

Now, Thomas thinks something went awry in the 20th century, with the rise of liberalism and the rights revolution of the 20th century. The three essential parts of the rights revolution, for Thomas, are the New Deal of the 1930s, the reforms of the criminal justice system—such as Miranda rights—and, finally, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. He believes these three revolutions worked a kind of poison in the black community. Each of these reforms harmed the black man’s status as a symbol of authority: It made him dependent on the government, irresponsible sexually, and a criminal ne’er-do-well through the elimination of harsh punishment. Thomas believes, with all sincerity, that the assault on authority in society more generally has been very destructive to black men and therefore the black community.

The only way the black community will get back on its feet, according to Thomas, is through the restoration of black men. This can only be achieved in conditions of adversity and exigency; then a heroic black male spirit will emerge from that. Even though the state is overwhelmingly racist, this is immaterial to Thomas. The black community needs the inner strength of the black man, more than any other community needs the strength of its men, because of the particularly imperiled position black people are in. In order to do this, you need to return to the antebellum Constitution—the White Constitution.

RG: Will Thomas leave behind a legacy for the larger political legacy of African Americans that we’re ignoring?

CR: That’s always been his aspiration. He is trying to create a public philosophical canon for African Americans. He realizes how improbable that project is. Nevertheless, that is his project. Is that likely to happen? My guess is no. These projects—black conservatism, Latino conservatism—have often been talked about. For example, Leah Rigueur’s excellent book The Loneliness of the Black Republican looks at how black Republicans were trying to do this in the 1960s and 1970s. Having said that, I have been struck, in talking to African Americans about this book and its contents, how many people have told me, “This is my father. This is my grandfather. I hear this all the time.” Now, these fathers and grandfathers aren’t Republicans, they’re Democrats—that’s the big fissure there. Some of Thomas’s stances won’t sound outlandish to African Americans. But the truth of the matter is, he is not a figure who is well-known, in the substance of what he believes in, among white Americans or African Americans.

The epigraph of the book is the opening of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I debated using it, because it’s a familiar passage—it feels almost clichéd and inflammatory to use. The experience of writing this book brought the power of that epigraph to light. It’s not simply that people don’t know what Thomas says; white Americans especially assume that they know what he said.

RG: Who do you hope reads your book?

CR: Everybody! Clarence Thomas is, today, the most powerful black man in the nation. Many liberals and leftists say we should listen to black voices, but those very same people who issue this call do not want to listen to his voice. We can’t listen to every voice, but his is a voice of tremendous power and authority in this country. As citizens, we are obligated to figure out where he is coming from, because he is helping to determine all our fates.

Secondarily, there are significant parts of what Thomas believes that reflect not just an ultra-right view but a view that crosses the political spectrum. This is a deep racial pessimism—the belief that the racial cleavages in this country are not something our politics or any politics can really handle. That view, which Thomas came to in the 1970s, has really migrated across the political spectrum. I end the book with the epilogue “Clarence Thomas’s America,” and I think that’s true: We are living in Clarence Thomas’s America. If you want to understand the country we live in today, this man’s whole worldview is, in some ways, an anatomy of that country.

The story of Reconstruction, more than any other topic in American history, is often tied to the myths and whims of the era in which it is written. Most historians and public commentators agree on what Reconstruction was: an attempt, after the Civil War, to rebuild American democracy so that it guaranteed civil, political, and economic rights to almost 4 million formerly enslaved people. But there is often disagreement about how much it achieved, what slowed its progress, and why it came to an end before its project was fully realized.

For the Republicans in office after the Civil War, there were really two Reconstructions. The first, the Reconstruction of Andrew Johnson, was designed to be conciliatory toward much of the rebellious South and had little intention of upsetting the status quo beyond a grudging acceptance of the end of slavery. The other Reconstruction, led by Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens, attempted to change the very terms of American democracy by extending the franchise and civil rights to African American men. It also aspired to something more—land reform, economic democracy, and the remaking of the American polity around the principles of racial equality and inclusion. The 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution guaranteed citizenship to all those “born or naturalized in the United States” and ensured that the right to vote would not be limited because of skin color. The second Reconstruction found its expression in the nation’s original civil rights legislation. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the first in American history to ensure equal protection under the law. It was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1875—the last gasp, in many respects, for the black political power and Radical Republican spirit that fueled many of the advances of Reconstruction.

From 1865 to 1877, both Reconstructions took place in an American South convulsed by almost constant violence. African Americans were massacred in cities as large as Memphis and in towns as small as Colfax, Louisiana, and Hamburg, South Carolina. The era was marked by a near-revolution and a counterrevolution, the latter succeeding in 1877, when the narrow victory of the Republican presidential candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, was followed by the withdrawal of the few remaining federal soldiers in the South in order to persuade Congress to back Hayes’s presidency. Although Reconstruction had been largely rolled back across much of the South before 1877, the withdrawal of federal troops is recognized as the end of the period.

The battle over whose Reconstruction would be remembered, however, persisted into the 20th century. During the Gilded Age and the Progressive era, as the democratic advances of the Civil War and Reconstruction were reversed by the Democratic and Republican parties and the Supreme Court, a new narrative of Reconstruction began to take hold: that of a white South broken by the Civil War, then taken advantage of by Northern carpetbaggers, Southern scalawags (white Republican Southerners), and recently freed African Americans who had gone from being enslaved to holding power over their former masters. This new narrative was more than an oversimplification; it was mostly downright wrong, a willful misrepresentation of the past by white Southerners and Northerners interested in telling a story that justified the rise of the Jim Crow system. But this view of Reconstruction stuck, and a whole body of historiography arose from it that prevailed for the first decades of the 20th century. It became known as the Dunning school, named after the prominent Columbia University historian William Dunning. Many of his popularizers, including Claude Bowers (author of The Tragic Era) and E. Merton Coulter (author of The South During Reconstruction), went even further in their efforts to paint Reconstruction as an era of corruption and mismanagement—one that called into question the ability of African Americans to govern.

W.E.B. Du Bois and other black historians provided dissents to this dubious narrative even as the accounts were being drafted. As early as 1909, when Du Bois gave a paper on Reconstruction to the American Historical Association, it was clear that African American scholars would have to lead the way in countering the prevailing narrative of Reconstruction as an era of black misrule across the South. While his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America became the seminal revisionist history of the period, Du Bois was not alone in this counterattack against a racist historiography. Reconstruction-era politician turned historian John Roy Lynch wrote The Facts of Reconstruction in 1913, just as the Dunning school’s influence on popular culture was reaching its peak. Anna Julia Cooper, in her 1892 A Voice From the South, described Reconstruction as a “period of white sullenness and desertion of duty.”

However, the majority of the historical profession ignored these demands for a new historiography until the 1960s, when the ascendant civil rights movement and a group of radical and liberal scholars began to chip away at a narrative shamefully long accepted by professional historians. Some of this was the result of their returning to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and acknowledging the need for a more accurate narrative about the era. But many other historians felt it was incumbent upon them to rethink Reconstruction in light of the civil rights movement, recognizing it as a period of biracial democracy in which black Americans took their destinies into their own hands and demonstrated their ability to help remake the country.

Historians like Kenneth Stampp argued in the 1960s that it was time for a narrative that avoided the racist exaggerations of the Dunning school and offered a more empirical exhumation of the nation’s past. African American historians like Lerone Bennett Jr. went further, asserting that Reconstruction provided Americans with a “usable history” that could better help everyone—black and white alike—understand the political tumult and possibilities of the 1960s. Bennett argued in the pages of Ebony magazine in November 1965 that there were two Reconstructions: a “white reconstruction from 1865 to 1866” and a more radical and emancipatory “black reconstruction from 1867 to 1877.” The revisionary work of the 1960s and ’70s culminated in Eric Foner’s 1988 classic Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, a book that continues to set the standard against which any history of Reconstruction is judged and that, in its 690 pages, helped unearth the period’s forgotten attempts to radically alter the nation for the better. For Foner, Reconstruction centered on the struggle over African American rights—and whether the nation would live up to the lofty ideals at the heart of pro-Union rhetoric after the Emancipation Proclamation became a rallying cry in 1863.

ttempting to bring this more radical and egalitarian history of Reconstruction to the general public and incorporating the last 30 years of work following up on Foner’s monumental book, Henry Louis Gates has produced a new PBS miniseries, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, and a companion book, Stony the Road, that aim to provide a fresh perspective for a mostly lay audience. Both seek to consolidate this revisionary narrative of Reconstruction, but they also carry it beyond 1865 to 1877. For Gates, Reconstruction was not just those years immediately after the Civil War. Instead, it encompassed a political era that began with the war itself, which opened the door to questions about race, citizenship, and democracy that were previously unfathomable, and then persisted as a moral, social, and political dilemma throughout the civil rights movement.

Gates adds a second argument to this historiography. He posits that Reconstruction was about not just the rise and fall of black political power in the South—although that is still a key element of any history of the era. He argues that it also concerned African American equality in the spheres of civil society, culture, and economics and that black Reconstruction continued in these areas well into the 1920s, even as the Southern revanchists attempted to impose a new white racial order.

Lengthening the Reconstruction era, Gates insists, allows Americans to think more deeply about how the African American experience fits into the longer arc of progress and retreat that has shaped the history of American democracy. His story of the rise of the “New Negro” is a case in point. Traditionally situated around 1920, this idea—of African Americans dedicated to restoring the lost dignity and rights of the Reconstruction era—is traced in Stony the Road back to the mid-1890s, when the first generation of African Americans born emancipated began to question their second-class citizenship. For Gates, this is an important reconsideration of the African American past. “The concept of the New Negro was employed by children of Reconstruction in the grip of Redemption,” he writes, but it has deeper roots and a longer history. The same is true, he continues, for all struggles for freedom in this country, in particular by black Americans but not by them alone. The history of American democracy has been one of constant push and pull, with rare moments of revolutionary triumph for the oppressed—surrounded and threatened with destruction by long periods of reaction.

ne of the strengths of Stony the Road is the ample room it gives to showing the racist imagery prevalent in popular magazines, political cartoons, and other cultural products of the era. With so much already written about Reconstruction’s achievements, this may be the book’s most important contribution: drawing links between the political and intellectual racism of the 19th and the 20th centuries and their racist popular culture, and then showing how black Americans struggled against them. For Gates, as well as for many other scholars of Reconstruction, the realms of politics and culture are inextricably linked. One cannot make a study of political power and inequality without looking at the ways they are manifested in everyday life.

Moreover, the racist and anti-racist images of American culture can help us better understand modern politics. One powerful example is found in the section titled “Chains of Being: The Black Body and the White Mind,” in which the reader is confronted not only with drawings and paintings that show “impartial” depictions—in the minds of many 19th and 20th century scientists and intellectuals—of the differences between the races but also with flyers and pamphlets created by white supremacists that reproduced these images well into the 1990s.

By showcasing the long history of antiblack imagery in American society, Stony the Road makes clear that the racist depictions of African Americans dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction continue to cast a long and frightening shadow on contemporary life. To state the obvious, racism did not vanish during these years of emancipation and political possibility, and for that very reason, Gates writes, it is important for progressives to always be on their guard: The struggle for freedom requires challenging those forms of racism that do not have direct links with politics but still inform the larger culture, a point that he discusses further in Stony the Road’s third chapter, “Framing Blackness.” Given the modern debates about Confederate statues and cultural representation, it is useful to recall how figures like Frederick Douglass stressed the importance of a positive portrayal of African Americans in popular culture—especially in photographs. (He was one of the most photographed Americans of the 19th century.) Images matter—a point that many of his heirs in the civil rights movement recognized.

Gates’s examination of the Harlem Renaissance bears out this point. Arguing that it was a “counterrevolution” against America’s cultural racism, he nonetheless notes that with the rise of the New Negro, black Americans at once staked out a new path for themselves and unfortunately embraced “some of the stereotypes about the Old Negro”—especially that formerly enslaved people could not take care of themselves and therefore that a New Negro needed to emerge.

By tracking the sometimes overlooked cultural battles among African Americans after Reconstruction, Stony the Road is also a story about how they fought against an internalized oppression even as they struggled to change a rampantly antiblack society. Efforts to promote the beauty and diversity of African American culture—in Du Bois’s “Exhibit of American Negroes” at the 1900 Paris Exposition, for instance—were paired with efforts to fight for the restoration of the civil and political rights lost during Reconstruction. Yet black Americans were also faced with an overwhelmingly powerful cultural apparatus that was difficult to escape. For every Paris Exposition, there were blockbuster films like Birth of a Nation and a plethora of other movies, books, and cartoons that portrayed African Americans using nothing more than backward racist tropes.

n both the miniseries and the book, Gates comments on how the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting in June 2015 informed his work on Reconstruction and the racist backlash. The history he was working on was far from over, even for someone as young as Dylann Roof, the terrorist who gunned down black worshippers at the Emanuel AME Church and who carried with him images that celebrated the Confederate States of America and the white supremacist regime of Rhodesia. The racism of the Reconstruction era and later, Gates writes, has “long become part of our country’s cultural DNA and, it seems, imprinted on [Roof’s] own.” Even as new laws were passed to abolish older racist ones, the cultural forms of racism survived, leading to new acts of political violence and new expressions of racial supremacy.

For this reason, the context of Stony the Road matters—not just given the current moment of revanchist white supremacy on the rise across the Western world but also in Gates’s battle for the mind of America. His career as a public intellectual has long been centered as much on the cultural expressions of racism as on the political and economic ones. It began in the 1990s, when a whole generation of liberals claimed that the work of racial equality had largely been achieved. In “The New Intellectuals,” the cover story for the March 1995 issue of The Atlantic, Robert S. Boynton held up Gates along with others—notably Cornel West and Patricia J. Williams—as part of a vanguard of thinkers who insisted that racism in American society was still prevalent and that the country needed to make real the goals of the various civil rights movements of the 1950s and ’60s. Like the post-Reconstruction era, the ’90s were a period of “scientific” racism and interpretations of crime as a racial, not socioeconomic, phenomenon, which were used to justify the political and civil inequalities that steadily crept back into American society after the advances of the 1960s.

Stony the Road—the title of which comes from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the black national anthem—gives us a powerful narrative of just how fragile the triumphs of American history truly are. The emphasis today on Reconstruction as an era of African American political and social power, snuffed out by white supremacy across America, is important not just because historians have treated it as such for decades now. It is also because many African Americans see their nation as one that has betrayed, over and over again, its greatest promises—to them as well as to the very idea of American democracy. Through the book and its companion miniseries, Gates calls on us to be ever vigilant in “our own struggles against the abhorrent face of anti black racism and white supremacy today.”

The loss of Toni Morrison is a horrible blow to the world of American letters. Leaving us at the age of 88, Morrison composed a body of work that holds its own with that of every other legend in American literature and thought in the 20th and early 21st centuries. While much of the focus in the immediate aftermath of her passing will be on her remarkable novels—The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, A Mercy—we would do well to remember her nonfiction and, in particular, how she used the essay to shape the way that American culture came to understand the African American experience.

Morrison’s 1992 collection of lectures, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, continues to be a trenchant analysis of how the changing idea of black identity in American society has been a central part of American literature and culture since the white colonialists landed in North America. In it, she insisted the idea that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year presence of, first, Africans and then African Americans in the United States” is patently false: “Even, and especially, when American texts are not about Africanist presences…the shadow hovers in implication, in sight, in line of demarcation.”

She felt it was incumbent on a new generation of African American writers to bring this experience to the fore, and this ambition drove much of her writing: Both her fiction and nonfiction aspired to place the African American experience at the center of American storytelling. In Beloved, she used the supernatural and the macabre to bring to light the horrors of slavery while offering an examination of the magnificent number of changes taking place in turn-of-the-century Ohio. In The Bluest Eye, she tackled the ever-present stain of internalized racism in the African American community. And in her essays and public speeches, she made clear, over and over again, that literature that was unapologetically for and about African Americans was also a central part of the American canon. In her 1987 eulogy for James Baldwin, she extolled him for having “un-gated” the language to allow black writers to “enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion.”

Morrison’s constant struggle to place African American experience squarely at the center of modern American life helped inspire a generation of black intellectuals and writers, including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Angela Davis. As an editor at Random House in the 1970s, Morrison championed their work and helped introduce the Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe to an American audience. By the late 1980s and early ’90s, her efforts had made her a key figure in the culture wars of that era. A veteran of a much older version of this conflict in the publishing industry, Morrison was ready to take on such a role, and she used her growing prominence as a novelist to refocus Americans’ attention toward the experience of African American women—depicting their struggles and triumphs as unique and robust examples of human experience.

er Nobel Prize speech in 1993 was a case in point. She warned of the systematic ways in which the powerful can “loot” language for their own purposes, evacuating it of its humanity and speaking only “to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.” But she also insisted that writers can use language in another way: to help those without power find their own voices. This language might never be able to “‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war”—it, too, had its limits. Yet for Morrison, this did not mean that writers should retreat from the awesome task of describing life. By recognizing the limits of the word, one could also recognize its strengths. Literature could not eradicate humanity’s evils, but it could force us to wrestle with them.

Morrison’s conversation with Cornel West in 2004, at the height of the Iraq War, offers another example of her keen sense of the limits as well as the liberating powers of storytelling. She spoke of the need to do more than merely champion an uncritical form of hope in such a bleak moment—she even chided him, “Cornel, I see you sitting here nodding and frowning, but…you always seem to be something I used to be but no longer am, optimistic”—yet both eventually come around to the same point: that stories can help us navigate the worst of times.

Her presence on the American literary scene radically changed it for the better. So, too, did her presence as an intellectual and a political and cultural critic. Asked in the late ’90s whether she could write a novel that did not center on race, Morrison changed up her interlocutor’s question to argue that everyone writes about race in some form or fashion, and so the question is not whether the experience of race is being written about but how it’s being done. This insight was at the core of her final collection of lectures, published in 2017 as The Origin of Others. In it, she again argued for the centrality of race and racism as themes in American letters. Today we still face the problem of othering people, and her powerful message remains as urgent in our moment. Ultimately, what she believed literature needs to do is to help us uphold what she called “the human project”: “to remain human—and to block the dehumanization and estrangement of others.”

Earlier this month, The Chicago Defender announced that it was publishing its final regular print issue. At first glance, it would appear to be the tragic end for another newspaper, another casualty of the decline of local print publications that a generation of journalists and citizens alike has had to endure. The owners of the Defender have argued that the best option for the paper to last for years to come is to go digital and join a growing number of former print newspapers in making the leap to online only. But the Chicago Defender’s unique place in American—and African American—history makes its loss particularly stinging. The Defender, in short, was one of the nation’s premier African American print publications. Its loss is a symbol of the decline of African American media and the potential loss of other points of view in local, regional, and national media.

The history of The Chicago Defender is a mirror of the larger history of the African American freedom struggle—the fight for civil, political, and human rights for African Americans in the United States. In the process, the Defender served as a venue for debates over how to achieve equality for African Americans. Publishing a dynamic array of prominent African Americans, from Langston Hughes to W.E.B. Du Bois, the Defender was often a champion of both desegregation and racial pride. Founded in 1905, the Defender was the brainchild of the lawyer and printer Robert S. Abbott. His newspaper became a critical organ of the city’s exploding African American population, promoting as it did more African Americans to move from the South to Northern cities during what would be called the Great Migration. The Defender’s role in this migration is incalculable; the newspaper was shipped partly through railroad porters who traveled across the country.

In addition, the long arc of African American history is difficult to think about without consulting the pages of The Chicago Defender, whose stories, read in retrospect, recount history from a distinctly African American point of view. Virtually all mainstream media in the United States at the turn of the 20th century viewed race relations strictly through the lens of the “Negro problem,” the phrase that many prominent Americans used to talk about the presence of African Americans in the country. As though the history of enslavement and the aborted process of Reconstruction were the fault of African Americans, media continued to view indications of “backwardness” from African Americans as proof of their racial inferiority. Newspapers, in fact, were important catalysts of anti-black race riots across the nation by spreading salacious and untrue stories about African American men sexually assaulting white women.

The Defender not only provided information to the African American community but also often provided more accurate accounts of these riots, confrontations with the police, and other stories that in mainstream newspapers were yet more examples of the “Negro problem.” When the Chicago Race Riots of 1919 engulfed the city’s largely African American South Side, Abbott used the Defender’s pages to urge African Americans to stay indoors. The newspaper, as a center of the community, was instrumental in ending the riots.

As the size of the African American population in Chicago grew, so did the importance of the Defender to national stories about race, civil rights, and freedom. The newspaper was also critical to the growing link between African Americans and the Democratic Party during and after the rise of the New Deal coalition in the 1930s. As Ethan Michaeli recalled in his book on the Defender’s history, the newspaper was critical for Harry S. Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign. “Here was the clear confirmation of the national import of black political power, and The Defender’s essential role in galvanizing this essential electorate,” Michaeli wrote about the newspaper’s significance in getting out the African American vote in Chicago.

he Defender was both a chronicler of African American events and a shaper of them. The decision to publish the photos of the destroyed body of Emmett Till in his casket in 1955, for instance, helped galvanize African American public opinion around his death—a moment that pushed many young African Americans to join the growing civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Jet magazine also published the photos, and in a sad coincidence, the same week the Defender ceased printing, it was announced that the publisher of Jet (as well as Ebony, another historic African American magazine), Johnson Publishing Company, would put its photographic archives up for auction.

African American–owned and –operated print media is at a crossroads, as is African American society in general. The ascendancy of Barack Obama may prove to have been a boon and high water mark for African American newspapers and magazines. The Defender had a front-row seat to the Chicago political machines that produced him as a viable statewide and eventually national candidate. It chronicled the rise of pivotal African American figures such as Jesse Jackson and Harold Washington and was there when Obama made his ill-fated run for Congress in 2000 (the only election campaign he ever lost). But what made the Defender different from its Chicago counterparts the Sun-Times and the Tribune was that the Defender presented a window into how African Americans saw their city and their place in it. The Defender served as a political clearinghouse for aspiring African American leaders, a nexus of social thought that allowed such leaders to reach a wide audience through the decades.

With the Defender going digital and the rise of such websites as The Root, as well as the popularity of Desus and Mero, it is clear that the future of African American media in this country rests heavily on the Internet. But the mission of African American media—in an age of misinformation and so-called fake news—continues to be one of providing different voices talking about important stories of the day. In a story covering the paper’s last print edition, the Defender reported an optimistic tone from its readers. Katara Patton, a writer for the paper, compared the Defender’s all-digital transition to music moving from cassette tapes to compact discs and then to streaming services. “The same good music is available,” she wrote. “It is just in a different mode.” With the need for African American media that is unafraid to talk about police brutality, economic inequality, and the continuing plague of white nationalism, the Defender and publications like it are as important as ever.

one was the optimism of 1963. It had been replaced by a sense of disillusionment, a sense of urgency that America was about to lose the last chance to have its soul.” This was how Jet magazine described the climax of the Poor People’s Campaign, which reached Washington, DC, in the tumultuous summer of 1968. For Jet and for many early civil-rights activists, the Poor People’s Campaign marked a frustrating epilogue to a movement that had captured the nation’s attention in the first half of the 1960s and come to a frustrating pace of change in its second half. Slowed by white backlash and political exhaustion, civil-rights leaders hoped the Poor People’s Campaign might give new energy to the radical visions of emancipation they had helped popularize, but for many in the movement’s rank and file, it felt like a desperate last cry rather than the beginning of a new phase in the struggle for racial equality.

In her new book King and the Other America, historian Sylvie Laurent helps rescue the Poor People’s Campaign from this unfair reputation and makes a compelling case that it deserves to be not only better remembered but also more closely studied and emulated by the left today.

For Laurent, the Poor People’s Campaign was the start of a new phase of radical activism and egalitarianism. While it failed to achieve the kinds of concrete reform that the earlier civil-rights movement won, it did inspire a whole generation of radicals to take a more holistic look at how discrimination in American society worked, helping them forge a powerful critique of racial and economic inequality in America. The Poor People’s Campaign, she argues, was a critical turning point and yet also a missed opportunity.

King and the Other America helps make another important argument. Situating the economic egalitarianism of the Poor People’s Campaign and Martin Luther King Jr.’s later years in a far longer history of black activism and social-democratic thinking, she helps map out the deeper intellectual and political roots of an entwined racial and economic egalitarianism that has been at the center of much of African-American politics for nearly a century. By doing so, Laurent offers us an elegant and timely history of how black intellectuals have long made a case for the intersections between class and race. Building on the work of Thomas F. Jackson, whose pioneering From Civil Rights to Human Rights redefined the history of King’s relationship to the social-democratic left in American history, Laurent helps us connect King’s vision of social democracy to a black political tradition that has always put economic inequality at its center.

o tell her story, Laurent begins not with the Poor People’s Campaign and its origins but goes back considerably farther, to the post–Civil War efforts by African Americans to achieve economic self-empowerment in the Reconstruction years. It is here, she argues, that one can find the origins of an intersectional egalitarianism and the roots of what become the Poor People’s Campaign and MLK’s social-democratic views.

During Reconstruction, various attempts at land ownership by African Americans were only the most prominent examples of black people trying to take control of their economic destiny. Frederick Douglass, for example, repeatedly pressed for the economic empowerment of recently freed black people, as well as the necessity of their uniting with poor whites across the South. Likewise, in an example often glossed over (and not mentioned by Laurent), South Carolina’s legislature also took on the project of economic redistribution. The most radical of the Southern legislatures during Reconstruction, it created a commission that redistributed land from former slave owners to anyone willing to pay taxes and interest for it over the course of several years. Open to any resident of South Carolina, the Land Commission’s offer was taken up primarily by black people, as white citizens boycotted the Radical Republican state government. Although it was ended by a Democratic regime in 1890, the Land Commission proved to be the only significant attempt by a state government to follow through on the promise of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s “Forty acres and a mule” special order in 1865.

King’s turn toward economic radicalism had other antecedents as well, and Laurent spends a considerable amount of time on them, especially W.E.B. Du Bois. Seeing the ravages of the Great Depression further damage the precarious economic condition of African Americans, Du Bois urged the consolidation of what little black economic power there was in the 1930s and ’40s, whether through cooperatives or other self-help agencies. Indeed, Du Bois had long had an interest in cooperatives, having written a book in 1907 titled Economic Cooperation Among Negro Americans. By the 1930s, he had added an incisive critique of how race and class intersected in American society and insisted that the only way to defeat racism was through cross-racial working-class solidarity. This was an argument central to Black Reconstruction in America, as well as in many of his other writings from this period.

By the 1930s, Du Bois was not alone in making the case that black emancipation would come only through shared class and material interests. A. Philip Randolph’s push for a march on Washington in 1941 called for a federal guarantee on defense-industry jobs for African Americans and was inspired by Randolph’s socialism and his insistence that the fight against economic inequality was central to the struggle against racism. The famous 1963 march that Randolph’s idea inspired—the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—also represented his and many others’ effort to tie economic and racial egalitarianism together.

The civil-rights movement always kept a close eye on the economics of racism. Many of the great clashes of the civil-rights era remembered today—the Montgomery bus boycott, the Albany movement of 1961–62, the Birmingham campaign of 1963—had links to local struggles over black economic empowerment. As Laurent notes time and again in the exhilarating first chapters of King and the Other America, civil-rights leaders learned from left-wing activists how to agitate for civil and economic rights, seeing the two as inextricably linked.

n examination of King’s ideological foundations forms a large part of Laurent’s book. She acknowledges that his ideological worldview cannot be easily pinned down: It was not just socialist or Christian or anti-imperialist; often it was all three at once and tending to draw from a medley of different sources, centered on the potential of American democracy and his principled stance against racism and imperialism in American society. King also had a loosely socialist analysis of American inequality that became more pronounced as the years went on. While he was not what Laurent calls a “procommunist Marxist,” he did use a Marxist analysis of political economy to build his critique of capitalism in the United States and to understand the ways race relations had been formed in the South.

King’s socialism influenced his answer to the problem of racial inequality in America, too. A reckoning with racism, he insisted, was impossible without radically redistributing wealth and, by extension, power in American society. His analysis of the riots of the mid- to late ’60s, which took place primarily in Northern and Midwestern cities, cemented this argument for him. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” King insisted at the height of that “long, hot summer”: For him, race, class, and economic empowerment were therefore all intertwined in these urban rebellions. Civil rights and voting rights were critical for African Americans, but King recognized that in places outside the South, where African Americans had practiced the power of the ballot for decades, economic power was also a necessity for black emancipation.

Historians have long contended that King’s left turn, coming in the late 1960s, marked a radical break from his more liberal and integrationist politics in the 1950s and early to mid-’60s. But Laurent compellingly shows how King’s increasingly outspoken views on economic inequality were simply a case of him making public the views that he already held privately and that he felt he could no longer keep private after years of witnessing the appalling poverty in both urban Chicago and rural Mississippi. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King was already insisting that it was only the first stage in the struggle for black freedom. Without a frontal attack on economic inequality, political and civil rights were not enough.

y offering a prehistory of King’s economic politics, Laurent convincingly demonstrates how thinkers like Du Bois and Randolph influenced King and how their critiques of American capitalism flowed from even older intellectual and political traditions that were at the bedrock of black politics. For Du Bois, Randolph, and King, their mixture of racial pride with an understanding of the need for cross-racial solidarity to fight entrenched economic interests was not something new but long in the making.

Another of the strengths of Laurent’s book is the seriousness with which she treats progressive efforts to construct a more just and inclusive vision of America in the 1970s and ’80s. Placing King in conversation with intellectuals like Kenneth Clark, Gunnar Myrdal, and Michael Harrington, she helps bring the history of racial and economic egalitarianism into the years after King’s assassination.

While some of this political and intellectual history has been covered elsewhere, what makes Laurent’s work so valuable is the way she situates the activism of the 1970s and ’80s in the context of King and earlier struggles for racial equality. The Poor People’s Campaign, with its calls for massive government spending on a domestic “Marshall Plan,” helped sustain the visions of economic and racial equality into an age of increasingly conservative politics. The 1966 Freedom Budget proposed by Randolph, King, Bayard Rustin, and other leaders in the civil-rights movement helped inspire the efforts to sustain and protect social democracy in America in the 1970s and ’80s. As King wrote in his foreword to the Freedom Budget, it signified “a moral commitment to the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded.”

In addition to reminding us of all this useful history on the issue of economic inequality, Laurent does an excellent job delineating the challenges that often made assembling a multiracial coalition on behalf of the poor and working class in the United States so difficult. Her chapter “A Counter-War on Poverty,’” on what happened with the Poor People’s Campaign when it arrived in Washington, is a case in point. In it, she discusses how the tensions between the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and those representing Latino, Native American, and poor white activists threatened to derail the campaign. Latino activists like Rodolfo Gonzalez and Reies Tijerina criticized the Poor People’s Campaign for its treatment of nonblack denizens of Resurrection City, and cross-racial solidarity turned out to be a powerful ideal often difficult to put into practice.

Yet the multiracial coalition and the campaign held together. The common experience of poverty and economic disempowerment often proved an essential elixir of interracial and class tensions, and one cannot help but wonder if the Poor People’s Campaign might have persisted into the 1970s and ’80s had King and Robert F. Kennedy, another prominent supporter of the campaign, not been gunned down in 1968.

Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns of 1984 and ‘88 came closest to reviving its vision, adopting a New Deal–like social-democratic politics in the mid-1980s, while building a wide-ranging and multiracial coalition to support it. But neither campaign broke out of the Democratic primaries and into the general election.

e would do well to recall the promise and learn the lessons of the Poor People’s Campaign today: A true multiracial coalition of working people in the United States will require an understanding of the unique historical experiences of the various racial and ethnic groups involved in order to achieve genuine gains for all. We cannot gloss over the differences in these experiences, but we cannot move forward without building a coalition that transcends them.

Recent debates about the need for reparations have opened another front in the long-lasting argument about whether social-democratic reforms will work for all Americans or, inevitably, leave the least of us behind, in particular those suffering from structural forms of racial inequality. King’s words have been used in support of reparations, with an oft-retweeted video of him talking in 1968 about the need for economic restitution to African Americans in the same vein as the aid to white farmers in the 1860s under the Homestead Act.

The creation of the act, with its associated funding of land-grant colleges, was in King’s view a worthy model that could be followed to help African Americans gain economic parity with other racial and ethnic groups. “Now, when we come to Washington, in this campaign,” King thundered, “we are coming to get our check.”

But the fact that King said this to a largely black audience in the Deep South while putting together his Poor People’s Campaign should give pause to anyone who argues that there is some kind of either/or at work between reparations and social democracy. Any political debate about reparations or broader social-democratic reforms will ultimately have to reckon with how King, Rustin, Du Bois, and many others found ways to make arguments for a politics specific to the inequalities experienced by black Americans and a politics that could also appeal to everyone. All pushed for the recognition of the unique historical and modern circumstances of African-American economic weakness, as well as the need for cross-racial solidarity to solve these problems.

The Poor People’s Campaign remains a clarion call for today’s left. One can make the argument for a social-democratic America and for those forms of justice that specifically address the violence and brutality of American racism. Perhaps for this reason, Laurent is not the only one recovering its importance and King’s social-democratic views. The recent collection of essays To Shape a New World, edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry, and the books of Michael Honey have also closely analyzed King’s relationship to the labor movement in Memphis, Tennessee, and have helped illuminate his social-democratic vision. Likewise, a latter-day Poor People’s Campaign has been launched by the Rev. William J. Barber II of North Carolina. As Barber explains, the new campaign seeks to highlight the issues facing poor and working-class Americans of every color by building a diverse grassroots base, bringing together “white women from the coal mines of West Virginia…with black women from Alabama.” This is precisely the kind of coalition that King fought for in 1968—and that we so desperately need in 2019.

Many Americans think of the South only in terms of two events: the Civil War and the civil-rights movement. This has also been buttressed, since the 1960s, by an interest in the “Southern strategy” that the Republican Party began to pursue with Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and that reached an apex with Richard Nixon’s mastery of racial code words (“states’ rights,” “law and order”) in the 1968 presidential campaign. A new history by Anders Walker, The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America, touches on many of these events and their lingering legacies, but Walker directs our attention elsewhere: to those intellectuals who, in the second half of the 20th century, sought to save some of the unique qualities of Southern culture.

The South, Walker argues, did more than offer heroic moments of black auto-emancipation and shameful moments of white supremacy; it also served as the arena for an ongoing debate over multiculturalism. This might seem like a strange assertion at first, as the politics of multiculturalism are usually framed in the context of the late 20th century, when conflicts over how to define a country’s cultural identity exploded in Europe. But Walker’s provocative thesis is this: Beginning in the 1940s, black and white writers—from Zora Neale Hurston to Robert Penn Warren—began to worry about what might happen to the South’s culture in the wake of integration. These writers were not defenders of segregation; in fact, most were active in helping tear it down. But they feared that the region might also lose some of its cultural heterogeneity: In particular, they worried that it might lose its distinct white and black cultures and become flattened into the more homogeneous culture found in the rest of America.

One might argue with this thesis on a variety of accounts. Thinking of the South as having two distinct cultures, one white, one black, as opposed to one culture that was a mixture of the two, is already highly questionable. For that matter, it is unclear if the rest of the nation was truly as monocultural as some of the intellectuals in Walker’s book seem to believe. The work of historians like Jon Lauck, for instance, reminds us that the Midwest has its own rich literary and cultural heritage—to say nothing of the significant racial and ethnic cultures that permeated other regions of the United States outside the South.

Even so, Walker has opened up a fresh way of thinking about the intellectual history of the South during the civil-rights movement, and he also asks some tough questions about how we should remember its legacy. A professor of law at Saint Louis University, Walker focused his first book, The Ghost of Jim Crow, on the white Southern moderates who, under the guise of promoting gradual progress and “respect” for African-American culture, tried to slow the implementation of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in the late 1950s. In The Burning House, we get a different set of ghost stories about the afterlife of Jim Crow, but it’s a book that follows the same line of reasoning, showing how the multicultural arguments made by intellectuals who wanted to sustain the South’s cultural heterogeneity had their own unintended consequences, ending up being used by Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in his effort to undermine affirmative action’s constitutional standing.

o tell this story, Walker gives us a wide-ranging intellectual and literary history, beginning with the rise of the Southern Agrarians in the early 1930s. Hurston and Warren, as well as James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Stokely Carmichael, all make appearances. Not all of these people were from the South—Baldwin and Carmichael grew up in New York, for instance—but nearly all of them spent much of their lives fighting against or writing about the region’s segregation. For these writers, culture and politics were never far apart. This was particularly true for Warren, who saw the cultural strength of the South as proof that the region needed nothing more than to reform its Jim Crow system—as opposed to a wholesale revolution overturning it. Other writers discussed in the book, such as Faulkner, promoted a similar ideology of the South being culturally superior to the rest of the nation due to the biracial and bicultural system arising from Jim Crow.

Walker doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to these white intellectuals. Their arguments for a biracial culture ultimately served to empower white Southerners, not black ones, and Walker’s story is very much about the untenable nature of their position. White Southern liberals had to choose between civil and human rights, on the one hand, and white-supremacist regimes, on the other; there was no middle ground. Seeking to preserve the South’s biracial character, in a context in which black Americans and their culture were not treated equally, figures like Warren ended up only helping to reinforce African Americans’ unequal status in the South. And so it is not surprising that many of these arguments were later invoked by people like Powell.

Walker’s argument becomes trickier when it involves those black writers who also expressed trepidation about the future of the South’s black culture and wanted to find a way to preserve it. In particular, many of these black intellectuals and activists worried about what would happen if, as Baldwin put it, black culture was integrated into the “burning house” of the United States. For Walker, this is what makes this generation of black writers so historically intriguing. They found the moderate position taken by white Southern liberals like Warren baneful, and they frequently challenged it. Yet they also questioned the bleak, materialist ethos of modern American culture and hoped that black culture might be able to preserve some of its unique characteristics—especially black culture as it existed in the South.

In one of the more eye-opening sections of The Burning House, Walker explores Warren’s interview with Carmichael just as the latter was beginning to enter his more radical phase in the mid-1960s. Warren initially expected Carmichael and other young black activists to support the integrationist drive not only in civil society and legal institutions, but also on questions relating to culture. So he was surprised to find Carmichael embracing a view of African-American cultural separation. When the two met in 1964, Carmichael had not yet made his complete turn to Black Power. But the ideas that formed the basis of the movement—self-reliance and a pride in African-American culture—were already there for Carmichael to adopt. In the interview, Warren asks Carmichael why nonviolence mattered. Carmichael explains: “I never took the approach we’ve got to teach them to love us…. I thought that was nonsense from the start. But I was impressed by the way [the demonstrators] conducted themselves, the way they sat there and took the punishment.” For Carmichael, the compelling feature of the civil-rights movement’s nonviolence wasn’t its ethical appeal, but that it represented an act of black resolve, a symbol of independence and black Americans’ power on their own.

For Warren, Walker notes, this “incipient iteration of Black Power proved a coup…enabling him to demonstrate that pluralism reigned even among young black activists, who demonstrated little interest in joining white society or culture.” But it’s hard to ignore the cynicism operating here. Warren and other white Southerners who wanted to see Southern white culture preserved had found few allies within the civil-rights movement; with figures like Baldwin and Carmichael, Warren wanted to show black Americans were making a similar argument. Baldwin and Carmichael, on the other hand, felt they had little in common with someone like Warren. Between them was a large gulf: Warren was in pursuit of a cultural pluralism for the sake of a once-dominant culture; Baldwin and Carmichael wanted a pluralism that might help emancipate and protect a culture that for centuries had been violently suppressed.

alker picks up some of these ambiguities in the second thread of his book, which chronicles the story of Lewis F. Powell Jr. A Virginia-born lawyer who served as a Supreme Court justice from 1972 to 1987, Powell is infamous among progressives for the so-called “Powell Memo,” which he wrote in 1971 to the US Chamber of Commerce, arguing that American business should become more involved in politics. What is less known—but for Walker is of immense importance—is the role that Powell played in defining a conservative idea of “diversity” in several Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s concerning school segregation and affirmative action in college admissions.

In Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973), Powell wrote a concurring opinion insisting that local community control of schools—and therefore de facto segregation—was constitutional. If, for example, various government programs had pushed African Americans into lower-income areas with fewer sources of funding for their schools, then so be it: The federal government, in Powell’s view, had no power to change such conditions, because to do so risked damaging the cultural autonomy of local communities. “As Powell saw it, Brown demanded an end to overtly segregationist law, nothing more,” Walker writes. Integration was a laudable goal, Powell claimed, but it could not be administered by the federal government, only by local school districts. More importantly, however, this opinion was an example of Powell arguing publicly that the South was, in Walker’s words, “no more guilty of racial injustice than anyplace else.”

One can begin to hear how Warren’s multicultural argument intersects with Powell’s defense of segregation in the Keyes concurrence. But Powell’s biggest contribution to the modern history of race and law came in the Court’s decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), when he argued that diversity could be taken into account as a factor in college admissions, but not to respond to historical injustice against African Americans. Instead, Powell thought that the only reason diversity could be taken into account was when it was designed to promote “academic freedom.” As Walker notes, this kind of argument, like the Southern moderates’ position examined in his first book, purportedly seeks to protect the “diversity” of cultural institutions but is, in fact, “hostile to aggressive government efforts aimed at achieving equality.” Like Warren, Powell made a case for multicultural pluralism that ultimately weakened the idea of social, as well as cultural, integration.

It is no coincidence that Powell’s rise to the Supreme Court in the early 1970s came just as the nation was attempting to reckon with the meaning of “Southernness.” Scholars like John Egerton, who wrote The Americanization of Dixie, and politicians like Jimmy Carter had started to ask serious questions about what it meant to be a white Southerner after the successes of the civil-rights movement. As a result, Walker argues, it was not only Powell and his fellow conservatives who found in cultural pluralism a means to enliven Southern identity; it was also liberals like Carter, who argued during his 1976 presidential campaign that “people have a tendency—and it is an unshakable tendency—to want to share common social clubs, common churches, common restaurants,” an argument that runs very closely to the one being made by those in the North and the South who sought to resegregate schools and neighborhoods.

Had The Burning House’s sections on the 1970s included Albert Murray, Walker would have found a fascinating foil for the arguments made by the likes of Warren and Powell. While offering glowing portraits of black culture in the South, Murray also argued in his 1970 The Omni-Americans that it was through these different cultures that a national American culture would emerge. “Ethnic differences,” Murray wrote, “are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity.” One could have a cultural pluralism while also not giving way to Warren’s vision of a dual Southern culture, or Powell’s use of “diversity” to defend de facto segregation and racial inequality. That Murray’s argument never gained a larger audience in his time was a symbol of the dominance of an American culture that, in the 1970s, wanted to move beyond concern about the antiblack racism associated with images of marches in the South. Threading the needle on race, culture, and diversity would be a bit easier if more intellectuals had wrestled with Murray’s example.

cholars and historians of the South have, in recent years, started to reflect on the diversity of thought in the region. Zandria Robinson’s This Ain’t Chicago makes a compelling argument for the differences between African Americans in the North and the South. Jason Sokol’s There Goes My Everything attempts to unveil the reactions of white Southerners to the revolution taking place around them. The Burning House fits well within the growing literature about the modern South, a literature that does not assume “Southern exceptionalism”—the view that the South’s history and culture are radically different from the rest of the nation—but, instead, attempts to understand the region from a variety of different viewpoints.

Even so, one weakness of The Burning House is that it’s not entirely clear that Powell was directly influenced by the Southern writers profiled in the first two-thirds of the book. It would be easy to assume that he came from the same ideological tradition as most of the white writers in Walker’s book, an ideology that criticized the worst excesses of Jim Crow while also remaining uncomfortable with integration. But there’s never a “smoking gun” to indicate that Powell gave credit to Warren for his Supreme Court rulings. Likewise, as Baldwin and Carmichael would have noted, there’s a world of difference between the cultural pluralism of black writers seeking an independent African-American culture and white ones seeking some continuation of the “Southern way of life.” After all, the Southern way of life for much of America’s history meant a world of slavery and racial hierarchy. That was hardly the kind of Southern culture that black intellectuals were calling for.

Nonetheless, The Burning House is a worthwhile book for anyone interested in the continuing importance of the South to the nation’s culture and politics. The recent off-year election in Virginia and the Senate special election in Alabama have proved that the road to a progressive future for the United States goes through the South. The Burning House reminds us that this road will be marked by twists, turns, and hazardous pitfalls. “Ethnic differences are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity,” Murray wrote in the introduction to The Omni-Americans. Understanding the fraught relationship between diversity and power—whether economic, political, or social—is something that still eludes most Americans.

Among its other accomplishments, the presidency of Barack Obama—you do remember it?—featured an unmistakable expansion of public appreciation for African-American history. This was especially true as his time remaining in the White House dwindled away: From the opening of the Smithsonian’s Museum of African-American History and Culture to the designation of a site in South Carolina as the nation’s first national park devoted to Reconstruction, the Obama presidency ended with considerable emphasis on how the nation conceives of African-American history in public spaces. In many ways, and despite whatever uncertainties lie ahead, Obama’s attempts to memorialize more of the African-American experience enhanced the meaning of what it means to be an American.

The idea that the United States has a “civil religion,” an argument first put forward by sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967, suggests that all Americans possess certain national touchstones for collective memory. We have a shared understanding of the importance of certain events, such as the battles of the American Revolution and the Civil War. This is crafted by public memory—history not necessarily as it is written by historians, but more generally, the ways in which the public remembers the past in popular culture and media. During Obama’s presidency, America’s civil religion expanded to include moments from the civil-rights struggle and other protest movements, all of which enhanced and enlarged the definition of who counts as an American. In a rapidly diversifying country, the importance of this achievement cannot be underestimated.

From his early entry into public discourse, which can be traced to the publication of his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama has written and spoken extensively of the importance of African-American history—both to himself and to the nation. Indeed, Obama wrote in that book about the importance writers such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Malcolm X had on the development of his own identity. As president, Obama continued his engagement with the black historical and literary tradition by using the power of the presidency to create landmarks to the African-American experience, thereby forever shaping public memory and America’s civic religion.

His second inaugural address, in 2013, for example, argued for the need to memorialize moments in African-American history as part of a larger national narrative. His famous line about “Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall” was an attempt to broaden the idea of who is remembered in American memory. In both the realm of presidential rhetoric and physical spaces, Obama worked time and again to broaden the ideas of what is memorialized, of who counts as an American.

His participation at the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Selma voting-rights march is another example of how the president used the power of the presidency to memorialize a national event. It would be easy to assume that anyone occupying the White House in 2015 would have participated in the Selma march. However, the symbolism of the first African-American president speaking to the power of the ballot—especially during a time of renewed voter suppression across the nation—could not be missed. In his speech, the president compared the site of Selma to other important places in American history: “As John [Lewis] noted, there are places and moments in America where this nation’s destiny has been decided. Many are sites of war—Concord and Lexington, Appomattox. Gettysburg. Others are sites that symbolize the daring of America’s character—Independence Hall and Seneca Falls, Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral.”

By comparing Selma to other important battles and turning-points in American history, Obama positioned the civil-rights movement within the highest pantheon of moments in America’s political and cultural history. Presidents, through public addresses and what they choose to memorialize, determine what future generations will also consider to be significant in the national story. Just as importantly, they choose the reasons why such moments deserve memorialization. This also matters. Think about President Ronald Reagan’s reluctance to support a holiday commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. When Reagan was finally compelled to sign the bill into law in 1983—after pressure from both civil-rights activists and Congress—he repackaged King as a color-blind, centrist hero. Even though King’s birthday is now a federal holiday, Americans are still debating the legacy of Dr. King, thanks to Reagan’s attempt to appropriate him for the conservative cause.

Remember, too, who Obama memorialized in his Selma address—not just Martin Luther King Jr. but also local activists like Amelia Boynton and C.T. Vivian, thus tying together the local and national civil-rights campaign as is not often done in important, nationally-televised speeches that help shape public memory. In that same address, Obama even spoke to how the activists were seen at that time: “Back then, they were called Communists, or half-breeds, or outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates, and worse.” His purpose was to remind Americans of the dangers of labeling anyone who dissents from the status quo as being so far outside the mainstream as to be alien to the American experience. (It was also, significantly, a rhetorical shot at Reagan’s attempt to redefine King’s legacy; one of the former president’s reasons for originally refusing to support the MLK holiday was his view that King had been a Communist stooge.)

Obama’s efforts to reshape American memory only accelerated in his final year in office. The opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in September 2016 was another occasion for Obama to memorialize African-American history as part of a larger American story of struggle and progress. The museum was created in 2003, long before Obama became president or even emerged on the national stage. But the opportunity of the its actual opening lent itself to Obama’s mission of commemorating African-American history as fundamental to the broader American story. As he argued during his speech, “too often, we ignored or forgot the stories of millions upon millions of others, who built this nation just as surely, whose humble eloquence, whose calloused hands, whose steady drive helped to create cities, erect industries, build the arsenals of democracy.”

These were encouraging and affirming words not just for African Americans, but for those historians of the American experience who have argued over the last 50 years for a shift towards looking at the lives and aspirations of downtrodden Americans, and not just those “great men” in power. Obama’s own speeches and rhetorical gestures, therefore, speak to a larger shift in how American public memory is being recorded, stored, and used.

Obama’s decision to grant national-monument status to a Reconstruction historic site in Beaufort, South Carolina, was another example of the president’s attempt to broaden what is memorialized in the United States. By establishing this national monument, the president corrected a previously grievous oversight by the national government—until then, there had been no national monument dedicated to the Reconstruction period. This is not a surprise. The Reconstruction era, long depicted through a racist and simplistic historical lens as a disaster in American history, has undergone a re-evaluation in the last fifty years among mainstream historians (and far longer on the left, going back to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, published in 1935). But for far too long, Americans appeared unwilling to commemorate Reconstruction as an important moment in American history. This was due to the era’s complicated racial and sectional politics, offering both an inspiring story of newly freed African Americans becoming citizens and the depressing end to that “experiment” only a decade after their freedom. Reconstruction has always resisted the easy American historical narrative of steady and inevitable progress.

Along with providing for the creation of a Reconstruction historic site, Obama’s proclamation last month also designated historic sites for the Birmingham civil-rights campaign of the early 1960s, along with ones that tell the story of the Freedom Riders of 1961. Both these sites commemorate not just the victories of the civil-rights movement but some of the worst violence from that time period targeted against civil-rights activists. Again, Obama’s designations show that he is concerned not only with remembering American history as one of constant progress, but also one of struggle and—in the case of Reconstruction—with the potential for devastating reversals.

Memory of the past matters. If Americans have a collective memory of the past that promotes activism and political participation, it has the potential to push modern and future activists to also imagine a better nation—just as freedmen and women did during Reconstruction, or activists in Selma and Birmingham a century later.

The fight to reshape American memory of the past is one that must be joined by common citizens, politicians, and academics. The battle over the creation of a Reconstruction memorial site was led by historians themselves—most notably Greg Downs, Kate Masur, and Eric Foner. Local activists have often fought for new ways to commemorate civil-rights struggles. Everyone has a role to play in continuing Obama’s efforts to expand the public memory and revitalize the civic religion into one that represents all Americans. We need it now as much as ever.

Earlier this month the social media teams for the two Democratic presidential candidates got into a heated—if not quite illuminating—spat on Twitter and Facebook about the meaning of progressivism. The Bernie Sanders campaign tweeted, “You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot be a moderate and a progressive”; while Hillary Clinton’s account replied that “an important part of being a progressive is making progress.” When asked about the exchange the following night, in an MSNBC debate, the candidates did not shed much more light on the question. “The root of that word ‘progressive’ is ‘progress,’” Clinton observed.

In search of nuance, we asked four historians to comment on how Sanders and Clinton each fit within in the context of the Progressive tradition, and what their respective candidacies might augur for its future. —Richard Kreitner

In Search of a Lost Ideology

Historians have long had trouble agreeing on what Progressivism really meant. After all, the various middle-class reform efforts of the early 20th century included Prohibition, labor reform, efforts to make sure that food and medicine were not adulterated, regulations of workplace safety, and the creation of the Federal Reserve, among many others. Even the Jim Crow laws of the South might be seen as one manifestation of Progressivism: an attempt by social elites to “organize” what they saw as the disruptive elements of their society, albeit in poisonously repressive ways. In a 1982 essay, “In Search of Progressivism,” historian Daniel T. Rodgers observed that various efforts to construct a coherent political ideology to characterize the early-20th-century political movement known as Progressivism had failed: As he put it, “progressivism as an ideology is nowhere to be found.”

When presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spar over which one is more progressive, they don’t have the reality of the Progressive movement of 100 years ago firmly in mind. Each candidate has his or her own reasons for trying to claim the word. For Clinton, it is a way of trying to win over the young, left-leaning voters who overwhelmingly support her opponent, while Sanders uses it to associate himself with a resurgence of democratic populism. Today, the term mostly offers a way of talking about left politics without using the word “liberal” (with its unpopular top-down connotations, and its history of critique by the right) or—even worse—the word left.

Nonetheless, there are some ways in which our own moment does closely resemble that of the early 20th century: in terms of rising income inequality, growing public anxiety about the political role of business, and a widening sense that business interests are cavalier with public safety and hostile to the public good. Although there are many points of commonality between Sanders’s campaign and the Progressive efforts of the last century—the criticisms of business, the advocacy for greater regulation—in one key way, his campaign seems very different. The intense political emotion, the sense of disillusionment with the present, and the idea of the necessity of broad-scale transformation are all at odds with the politics of early-20th-century Progressivism, which was deeply concerned with the threat of upheaval from below. In this sense, although not in others, the Clinton campaign may be more in keeping with Progressivism as it has been classically understood: While her proposed reforms are far less bold than those of the Progressives, she seeks, as they generally did, to channel political unrest, while leaving underlying social inequalities untouched.

A New Wave

In order to understand where Sanders and Clinton fit within the Progressive tradition, it’s vital to know who the Progressives were and what they represented. Such questions have bedeviled generations of historians because there are no easy answers. Workers and farmers formed the largest constituencies of Progressive Era reform. But urban middle-class activists, white and black, male and female, also made their mark on the Progressive tradition. Progressives shared a belief in social improvement by way of public or collective action, focused on a wide array of social ills, and offered a variety of remedies and reforms: from a graduated income tax to public kindergartens, from eight-hour day laws to municipal ownership of utilities.

A consideration of the Progressive presidents of the early 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, shows why drawing boundaries around a Progressive tradition can be a hazardous undertaking. Roosevelt attacked the outsized role of corporate power, and called for a national system of health insurance and for pensions for retirees. Yet Roosevelt also had good friends on Wall Street, betrayed African Americans’ civil rights, and was an ardent imperialist and warmonger. Wilson presided over such watershed reforms as the income tax, the Federal Reserve Act, the direct election of senators, and the extension of suffrage to women. Yet Wilson was also a white supremacist who oversaw the segregation of government offices in Washington, and whose “war to make the world safe for democracy” did not accomplish its stated goal, to say the least.

Both Sanders and Clinton have their Progressive Era heroes. Sanders has a plaque of the Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs mounted on the wall of his office. Like Debs, Sanders embraces the secular faith in human solidarity, and calls for sweeping reforms to create a more equitable and humane society. But that doesn’t make Sanders a 21st-century version of Debs, who worked to create a “cooperative commonwealth” resting on the power of the unions, alliances, and cooperatives of workers and farmers. Though Sanders speaks of a “political revolution,” how far that extends beyond a more or less traditional presidential campaign is often difficult to discern.

Clinton, meanwhile, has cited the work of Jane Addams on behalf of immigrant children as the type of service that has inspired her. Addams was a Progressive reformer who sought the middle ground between capital and labor, between Debs and the railroad corporations. A political career, of course, was closed to Addams, who spent her life devoted to often small and partial steps to improve the lot of the urban poor. Clinton is a powerful politician who seeks the middle ground between Wall Street and its critics, and who sees compromise and halfway steps as the preferred road to progress.

The future of progressivism will unfold at the same time as the political system undergoes a realignment. In recent decades, the Republican Party has steadily evolved into a conservative party, purging its progressives and moderates and cornering the political market on white racial resentment and xenophobia. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is shedding its ancient reliance on the white-supremacist vote, and today embraces multiple progressivisms that have pushed the party’s positions on domestic policy to the left since a Clinton last occupied the oval office. A similar shift has yet to occur on foreign policy, as progressives within the Democratic Party, from Obama to Clinton to Sanders, continue to embrace the prerogatives of the US war machine. But perhaps a new wave of progressive renewal will bring to the fore more humane and universal notions of equality and social justice.

As Goes the South…

The future of progressivism is inextricably linked with the future of the American South. The current Democratic primary campaign is only one example of this. But even more important is the likelihood that come November, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and other Southern states will revert to what they have been for most Democratic Party presidential candidates in recent decades: states to be ignored.

In most states of the Deep South, the Democratic Party is a mere shell, barely competitive in national elections. Such a political vacuum disserves and disenfranchises millions of citizens—overwhelmingly African Americans—who need a government that works for them. To allow this neglect to continue would be an egregious mistake.

The birth of a sustainable movement in the South has been a dream of the progressive-minded for generations. After the Civil War, Reconstruction offered a chance for the South to remake itself into a more egalitarian region, before political violence by Southern whites and exhaustion among Northern whites brought it to a premature end. Subsequent attempts to challenge the conservative (often Democratic) status quo regularly collapsed: The Western-dominated Populists of the 1890s failed to rally Southerners of any race to their cause over the long term; widespread textile strikes in 1934 fell victim to a lack of local institutional support; the CIO’s postwar “Operation Dixie,” which attempted to unionize thousands of Southern workers, couldn’t overcome racial hostility; and, finally, attempts by African Americans in the late 1960s to remake the Southern political landscape, through the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party or Alabama’s Lowndes County Freedom Organization (the original Black Panther Party), fell short.

More recent campaigns like Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential runs further demonstrated the perils and the possibilities of progressive politics in the South. Although Jackson’s presidential campaign had the support of large amounts of African-American voters in 1984, and forged an even more diverse coalition (including poor whites) in 1988, he was still unable to win the nomination—or even to win significant concessions from the Democratic leadership. During his 1992 presidential run, Bill Clinton used a speech by the rapper Sister Souljah before the Rainbow Coalition to distance himself from Jackson, thereby solidifying support among moderate white voters. Meanwhile, liberal and left-wing elements within the Democratic Party struggled to resist the leadership’s sharp turn to the right, a pivot spurred by consideration of the limits of electability in post-Reagan America.

Neither Democratic candidate is untouched by this complicated history. Bernie Sanders endorsed Jackson for president in 1988, and his focus on class issues is an echo of many of the concerns Southern progressives have had for decades, not least the 1966 “Freedom Budget” proposed by civil-rights leaders A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr. Hillary Clinton, who promises to address the concerns of Black Lives Matter activists and to resume the fight for comprehensive immigration reform, observed Southern politics firsthand while she was first lady of Arkansas. If Clinton is sincere about these initiatives—and considering how much she will likely owe African Americans if she wins on Super Tuesday, she will not have much choice—there will be further opportunities for Southern progressives to push for even more significant change.

It is time for progressives to assume a more active role in the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. Movements such as the Fight for $15, which has made a strong showing in Atlanta, and the Moral Mondays protest movement in North Carolina show the desire for a resurgence of progressivism in the region. Demographics alone will not be destiny, but the forging of coalitions between African-Americans and a growing Hispanic population, along with working-class and middle-class whites, offer a promising beginning. If the Sanders campaign for a “political revolution” leaves a lasting legacy in the South, progressivism will be revitalized in the region as never before. But this has to happen regardless of who wins next week, or in November. The Democrats can win national elections without the South. But they will not have the political will, or the muscle, to effect truly progressive change without Southerners.

Both/And

At the risk of being disagreeable, let me start by disagreeing with the premise of this forum: Trying to figure out where Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton fit into the history of “progressivism” only muddles the key differences between them. It can hardly be otherwise, since the term has had such a promiscuous life in American politics. A century ago, racist Southern Democrats and the founders of the NAACP both embraced it. A few decades later, so did the Communist Party. Sometime in the 1990s, it became a fallback identifier for pretty much anyone The Nation and its journalistic kin smiled upon.

Fortunately, excellent substitutes are available.

Hillary Clinton is best described as a liberal. Like liberals from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, Clinton wants to use the federal government to improve the lives of the majority of Americans. Like nearly every Democratic presidential candidate since the 1970s, she makes special pitches to women, non-whites of both genders, and the LGBT community. But she largely views social movements as creatures to be wooed and managed. What she really cares about is shrewd, effective governance. Like every liberal president (and most failed Democratic nominees) since Wilson, she wants the United States to be the dominant power in the world, so she doesn’t question the massive sums spent on the military and on the other branches of the national-security state.

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is a leftist. Although he has been winning elections since 1981, Sanders resembles his hero, Eugene V. Debs—the Socialist who ran five quixotic races for president, the last time, in 1920, from a prison cell—far more than he does a standard-issue career politician. Other pols identify with “revolution” and claim their campaign is a “movement.” But Bernie really means it. He is perpetually on the attack against undue power and misused privilege, armed with an unvarnished class-conscious message that, until the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, had long been absent from the public square. He advocates policies he knows even a Congress controlled by Democrats would be quite unlikely to implement: breaking up the biggest banks, making public colleges and universities free to all, outlawing private donations to campaigns, and more. Except for increasing aid to veterans, he seems cold toward every part of the military establishment. His true foreign policy is, in effect, a domestic policy that would turn the United States into another Norway.

Despite these fundamental differences between Clinton and Sanders, the fierceness of their rivalry should not obscure a central truth of political history: Leftists and liberals have always needed each other to push America toward becoming a more humane, more equal place. Radical activists and intellectuals promote fresh ideas, challenge entrenched elites, dedicate themselves to grassroots organizing, and push liberals down paths they might otherwise have avoided or tiptoed along at a craven pace. Liberals build governing coalitions that enact measures, from the progressive income tax to the Civil Rights Act to Obamacare, which improve the lives of ordinary Americans.

It would be a serious mistake for “progressives” of any stripe to ignore this symbiotic relationship. Leftists backing Bernie ought to realize that the route to a social-democratic Promised Land will be long, arduous, and uncertain. Clintonian liberals should embrace the passion for a transformed America that has always been essential to making meaningful reforms in the existing one. Neither can ignore the certain consequence of an internal battle that lasts beyond the time when one of the two candidates secures enough delegates to win the nomination: a federal government under the total control of a Republican right that is determined to undo nearly everything liberals and leftists have achieved.