The nation is now divided between people who want a multiracial democracy in which every American is allowed and encouraged to vote, and those who yearn for an anti-democratic system in which an extreme white minority has unchecked control over everyone else.
At the close of the Civil War, people recently freed from slavery in Charleston honored fallen Union soldiers. A battered U.S. was faced with the task of burying and honoring the 600,000 to 800,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who had died.
Racial justice forces need to win governing power within the current system and then continue to build the strength to dismantle the racist state and replace it with an antiracist one: fight against the white republic and for antiracist democracy.
Eric Foner, the pre-eminent historian of the civil war and Reconstruction, sees parallels with our own time but warns yesterday’s solution would be a disaster
The story of Irish-American draft resisters, African-Americans who defied the odds in order to fight, and women who found alternate ways to support the war.
How does our epoch of political polarization compare to the decade that was rent over the issue of slavery before the Civil War? Historical analogies can be misleading, but the controversies that bedeviled that age still haunt us. In certain ways, they foreshadow our own divided house.
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