During Reconstruction, those who had been discarded by Southern society — Blacks, the poor, people with disabilities — gained access to an education and other basic rights they never had before.
Today, nearly every Southern state has preempted local minimum wage increases. These laws have been passed in response to recent efforts by big cities, which include more non-white residents, to increase wages for the lowest paid workers.
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During the 1870s, more than a half a million Black men voted for the first time in their lives. But this wave of progressive change did not last long.
The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment marked a turning point in U.S. history. Yet 150 years later, its promises remain unfulfilled.
Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis delivered a speech during the Du Bois 150th Birthday Celebration. Du Bois at age 95 was more radically unorthodox than virtually any other engaged intellectual of the 20th century. The real problem was really the manipulation of race in the service of wealth.
By 1871, Congress had authorized the bank to provide mortgages and business loans. Such mortgages and loans, however, were usually given to whites, creating a financial paradox -— a bank using the savings and income of black depositors to advance the economic fortunes of whites who had at their disposal mainstream banks that excluded blacks.
Biographer Chernow "gives us a military genius who understood the full scope of the war and pursued a winning strategy," writes reviewer Richard Moe, "and a sometimes inept president who, though unschooled in politics, made his highest priority the protection of the lives and rights of freed slaves."
Americans should build this pivotal post–Civil War era into the new politics of historical memory.1877
Forget that Donald Trump said something commendable about Frederick Douglass--perhaps a first for Trump--the autobiography of Douglass is a classic, and reading it again is a fit way to commemorate Black History Month. Washington Post book editor Ron Charles gives ample reason why.
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