The End of the Second Reconstruction

Democracy in the United States is under threat. The Trump administration’s attack on the legacy of the civil rights movement is undermining America’s claims to be a multi-racial democracy.

This moment of peril has worrying parallels with a previous era of American history. The gains of the Reconstruction era after the civil war, which saw African Americans given full democratic rights, were totally reversed within a generation. There is a serious risk that the advances of the civil rights...