The Third Reconstruction
America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
One of our preeminent historians of race and democracy argues that the period since 2008 has marked nothing less than America’s Third Reconstruction
In The Third Reconstruction, distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.
America’s first and second Reconstructions fell tragically short of their grand aims. Our Third Reconstruction offers a new chance to achieve Black dignity and citizenship at last—an opportunity to choose hope over fear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Texas historian Joseph (The Sword and the Shield) tracks in this impassioned and immersive chronicle America's "unhappy pattern" of racial progress sparking political backlash from the 1860s to the present day. Contending that the post–Civil War Reconstruction era constituted the country's "second founding," Joseph examines how the "moral failure" of Jim Crow set the stage for two more recent periods of intense fighting over racial equality: the Second Reconstruction, comprised of the decades between the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and the Third Reconstruction, which was set in motion by the 2008 election of Barack Obama. According to Joseph, the distance between Obama's "racial optimism" and the "melancholy reality of Black life" gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and its vision of "radical Black dignity" influenced by Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and others. Amid the incisive historical analysis of battles between "reconstructionists" pushing for a true multiracial democracy and "redemptionists" seeking to "reinscribe slavery's power relations," Joseph interweaves moving reflections on his experiences growing up in Jamaica, Queens in the 1980s. The result is an essential reframing of America's past and present. Photos.
