Multiracial Democracy is Young and Fragile
A brief history of the struggle to reconstitute a nation built on racial hierarchy around the principle of equality – Part I: The lessons from the rise and fall of Reconstruction
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This is Part I of a two-part series on the history of multiracial democracy in America. Not a total history, of course, but something that can serve as a framework for how to think about this long struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in this country, the core dynamics that have shaped it, and the various stages and eras is has experienced.
Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America was not a democracy. It was certainly not what we, in widely accepted parlance today, call “democracy.” It absolutely had no reasonable claim to be considered a *multiracial* democracy.
I know this may all sound awfully “political,” in the sense that it comes with a fairly straightforward partisan valence. But that is entirely a function of the fact that democracy itself has become a partisan issue, as the Republican Party is fully at war with pluralistic society and the principle of equal citizenship.
The Voting Rights Act set the United States on a path to becoming something that it had not been until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s: A multiracial, pluralistic democracy. And because the staunchly anti-egalitarian, anti-pluralistic forces that have always shaped the American story didn’t just vanish into thin air but instead engaged in a comprehensive countermobilization against modern democracy, the conflict over whether or not it should be allowed to endure and prosper has been the central fault line in U.S. politics ever since.
In that sense, and in that sense only, last week’s Supreme Court decision to essentially nullify what remained of the Voting Rights Act is helpful: It clarifies both the nature and the stakes of the political conflict. The question at the core of this struggle is this: Can a society built on racial hierarchy be transformed into a multiracial democracy? Or, put differently: Must America be forever defined by strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth – or can the nation finally realize its promise of egalitarian pluralism?
The Roberts Court ends the Second Reconstruction
On April 29, with its decision in Louisiana v Callais, the rightwing majority on the Supreme Court made the Voting Rights Act useless as an instrument to protect minority representation. It opened the door wide for even the most brutal racial gerrymander, the complete erasure of minority-majority districts across Republican-led states, a dramatic rollback of Black political representation not just in Congress, but on the state and local levels as well. In practice, the ban on racial discrimination on voting is no more.
It is an obscene decision, using a weaponized understanding of “colorblindness” that deliberately obscures the distinction between considering race in order to uphold a racially discriminatory system vs. doing it to dismantle that system. It completely inverts the intention of the Reconstruction Amendments. You cannot use the Constitution to remedy anti-Black racism, the Roberts Court says – in fact, if you do, you are the real racist; but you can totally engage in racial discrimination against non-white minorities as long as you pretend it’s all about partisanship. This decision returns the country to the situation before the Second Reconstruction that was codified in the 1960s civil rights legislation by allowing for systematic racial discrimination intended to entrench white dominance based on facially neutral laws.
That is why you have heard historians and political scientists unequivocally call this an era-defining – or, rather: era-ending – decision. Because Louisiana v Callais is, in many ways, the culmination of a “backlash” against multiracial democracy, and because it will in turn fuel the escalating reactionary countermobilization, it signifies the end of a distinct phase in U.S. history. The Second Reconstruction is over; we are into the second “Redemption” now.
A lot of observers have been using those terms, and rightfully so! But I believe they deserve some explanation and reflection. They come with the weight of history, they transport a sense of decline, of potential doom. And they entail a responsibility to act in response.
What can I contribute in this situation? I want to offer an attempt to situate our moment in the long struggle for Black voting rights and minority representation. To grasp the historical significance of what the Roberts Court has done, we must understand what America was prior to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the transformative impact of the Voting Rights Act. We must also understand the historical references that ought to shape our response: Reconstruction and “Redemption,” Second Reconstruction and why it has ended. And we must grapple with the concepts we use to make sense of what is happening around us, perhaps without fully grasping their implications: What do we mean when we say “democracy”? What is a *multiracial, pluralistic* democracy? How has our understanding of those terms evolved – and more importantly: How has “democracy” changed over time as a historical reality that shaped the lives of generations of Americans?
With those questions in mind, I want to offer a brief investigation of multiracial democracy in America. Not a total history, of course, but something that can serve as a framework for how to think about this long struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in this country, the core dynamics that have shaped it, and the various stages and eras that have structured it. In this Part I, I will focus on the fate of the first Reconstruction after the Civil War, on why it is such a crucial historical reference point, and on the lessons and implications of this story for our current moment. Part II will follow later this week and continue the story from the rise of the Second Reconstruction all the way through our very present.
(Please note: The scholarship on American democracy and its discontents that I am basing these reflections on is vast. I hope to be putting out an annotated bibliography soon, listing what I believe are the best and most useful readings on the past and present of multiracial democracy. For now, let me point you specifically to the work of historians Eric Foner, Manisha Sinha, and Jefferson Cowie, whose analysis and interpretation of Reconstruction and the white countermobilization has most deeply influenced my understanding of this part of U.S. history.)
What we mean when we say “democracy”
The 1965 Voting Rights Act significantly changed the political and societal order in the United States. This observation stands in contrast to the idea of a continuous democratic tradition going all the way back to the Founding. In fact, the idea of America as the oldest democracy in the world features prominently in the collective national imaginary. And while that is not necessarily incorrect, depending on the definition of “democracy,” such a notion certainly obscures more than it illuminates about the reality of American life. It suggests a continuity of a democratic regime based on the American Constitution – when in fact the term has applied to a variety of regimes. Under the label “democracy,” they differed widely in terms of who was actually enabled to participate in the political process as equals – and even more so with regards to whether or not they extended the democratic promise to other spheres of life beyond politics: to the workplace, the family, the public square. They often existed side by side for long stretches of the nation’s history, as manifestations of competing, even incompatible ideological visions.
If we want to understand what “democracy” actually meant as a reality people experienced at different moments in time, we should explore and assess it not as a yes-or-no proposition, but on a scale – with an emphasis on change over time and on changing practical realities, on how democracy actually structures the lives and experiences of the people. Basically, whenever someone says “democracy,” we should ask: What kind of democracy, how much, and for whom?
(As an aside, I will note that there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “democracy.” This question is itself part of the ongoing struggle: What counts as “democratic”? What are the minimum hurdles a system needs to clear in order to qualify? When Viktor Orbán was defeated in Hungary a few weeks ago, supposedly “reasonable” conservatives like Ross Douthat at the New York Times were quick to declare that all the talk about Orbán’s “illiberalism” had been overheated: The fact that he was ousted in an election, the argument went, somehow proved he had never been an authoritarian to begin with! Such attempts at deploying a “minimalist” definition of democracy that basically just means “elections,” no matter the circumstances, no matter how free and fair, are a good reminder of how little the term “democracy” itself means unless we pay attention to the substance of the political and social reality to which it is being applied. In the case of the “See, Orbán was never a threat to democracy!” brigade, we are just dealing with bad-faith attempts to legitimize Orbán and his political project of pseudo-democratic illiberalism for a mainstream audience.)
The fundamental reality of U.S. history is this: Before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the American political system was fairly democratic, at least by contemporaneous international comparison, if a person happened to be a white Christian man – but it was something else entirely if they were not. For much of U.S. history, most of the population was largely excluded from the democratic promise – from voting in elections or from participating as equals in all matters affecting the collective fate of the polity. Until relatively recently, the political system was best described as a white man’s democracy, or racial caste democracy. There is absolutely nothing old or consolidated about *multiracial, pluralistic democracy* in America. It, quite literally, only started a little over 60 years ago.
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Reconstruction: The great democratic experiment
On paper, the United States became a multiracial democracy almost exactly one hundred years earlier, with the passage of the Reconstruction amendments to the constitution after the end of the Civil War.
The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment, adopted in July 1868, established birthright citizenship, formal equality before the law, and the principal of nondiscrimination. The 15th Amendment, ratified in February 1870, barred the federal government and the states from denying a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
It is hard to overstate the significance of what happened here. As the Civil War ended, and those who had chosen to commit treason in defense of their right to enslave fellow human beings were defeated on the battlefield, the nation was fundamentally reconceptualized. The Reconstruction Amendments changed the nature of the constitution – the document itself, but also the political and social regime it prescribed – so profoundly that the historian Eric Foner has called it a “Second Founding.”
According to Foner, the Reconstruction Amendments “transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to substantive freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government.”
This attempt to transform a nation built on racial hierarchy into a biracial democracy was nothing short of revolutionary. And that is exactly how the framers behind these amendments saw it. They explicitly intended regime change: From a regime grounded in slavery to a regime grounded in equality.
What followed was an awe-inspiring democratic experiment. Officially, the so-called Reconstruction period lasted from 1865 through 1877. Its exact dates differed from region to region, however. Sometimes, Reconstruction started before the end of the war, when the Union Army conquered Confederate territory. In some places, whatever progress had been achieved was rolled back before 1877; in other places, the biracial experiment lasted into the 1880s, until the consolidation of Jim Crow apartheid. Regional differences notwithstanding, the overall impact of Reconstruction was brief, but breathtaking.
Amongst white Americans, there was a widespread expectation that formerly enslaved people would probably not know what to do with their newly acquired rights. But in reality, voter turnout among Black people was extremely high. The Black population constituted an outright majority in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; a near majority in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia; and around 40 percent in Virginia and North Carolina. By 1867, well over 80 percent of Black men registered to vote across the South – more than half a million African Americans had joined the electorate by the early 1870s, meaning they outnumbered white voters across the former Confederacy.
Black political representation exploded basically overnight. About 2,000 Black men were elected to public office at the local, state, and federal levels. That included 600 African Americans who were elected to state legislatures, and 16 who were elected to serve in Congress. Mississippi sent two Black senators to Washington. South Carolina, the heart of the former Confederacy, elected a majority Black state legislature in 1868.
And beyond just politics in a narrow sense, African American social and cultural life soared in those years. Here was the glimpse of what a society that extended the democratic promise beyond just the white population might look like. The country achieved a level of biracial democracy it wouldn’t reach again until a century later.
White supremacist “Redemption”
It did not last. America’s first attempt at biracial democracy was toppled in different places at different moments. But across the South, it was drowned in ostensibly “race-neutral” laws and almost unimaginable levels of white reactionary violence.
The “backlash,” or rather countermobilization, started immediately, long before the official end of Reconstruction. It was led by people who called themselves “redeemers” – engaged in a project to “redeem” the South. In practice, that meant restoring white supremacy and racial segregation, initially via a series of laws called Black Codes that state legislatures passed in 1865/66. “Redemption” was orchestrated by the white supremacist wing of the Democratic Party – and by organized terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan serving as “Redemption’s” paramilitary arm. They assaulted Black lawmakers and Black voters, targeted biracial local governments and legislatures. At least 2,000 African Americans were killed between 1865 and 1877; that is just the number of documented victims – thousands more may have been murdered, with tens of thousands being attacked, beaten, raped, and forced to flee.
In 1867, Republicans in Congress passed a series of statues enacted over the vetoes of President Andrew Johnson. These so-called Reconstruction Acts defined certain conditions for the readmission of former Confederate States into the Union, including the establishment of equality before the law and the guarantee of Black suffrage. Crucially, they also established martial law. But the Union Army was quickly demobilized at the end of the war, the actual number of troops deployed to the South as part of a military occupation was only around 15,000, and many of them were busy fighting Native Americans.
However, the federal government reacted more forcefully to the astonishing level of terrorist violence in the late 1860s and early 1870s once Ulysses S. Grant entered the White House. Based on the Enforcement Acts passed by Congress in 1870 and 1871, President Grant sent federal election supervisors to the South and deployed the military to go after white vigilante groups (the third of the Enforcement Acts is better known as the Ku Klux Klan Act). These measures had a significant impact; as a result, the 1872 election was probably the freest and fairest election in the South until after the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Alas, as the northern support for Reconstruction crumbled, federal enforcement soon ended – and multiracial democracy in the South had no chance. Broadly speaking, the political coalition behind Reconstruction consisted of Black people, Radical Republicans in Congress, and northern industrial elites who wanted to break the power of Southern oligarchs. The latter lost interest when they had achieved what they wanted – and therefore increasingly focused on the conflict between capital and labor. Once the military occupation officially ended and it became clear that the federal government would no longer interfere, yet another wave of white supremacist violence swept across the South.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court began undermining the Reconstruction Amendments as soon as they were passed, interpreting them in a very narrow way, and constantly siding with the Southern states over federal power.
The enemies of multiracial democracy understood that they had to restrict Black political representation above all else – and therefore disenfranchise as many Black people as possible while nominally staying within the boundaries of the Constitution and the law. The Constitution does not mention an inherent right to vote, and the 15th Amendment does not specify such a positive right either, only prohibiting discrimination in voting based on race. That left room for the states to come up with all sorts of ostensibly race-neutral restrictions that nevertheless had the intended effect of dramatically curtailing Black participation.
Starting in the late 1880s, the Southern states rewrote their constitutions to ensure complete white domination. They passed voting laws that disenfranchised Black Americans via poll taxes, literacy tests, or property requirements. As a result, voter registration rates and Black turnout plummeted from around 80 percent to somewhere in the zero to five percent range, where they would remain until at least the 1940s. Black representation was extinguished. After 1881, the South did not elect another Black person to the Senate until 2013. After 1901, no Southern State sent any Black Representatives to the House until 72 years later.
To complement the near complete disenfranchisement and pseudo-legal discrimination, the Southern states erected a brutal apartheid regime that segregated all spheres of life and was defined by pervasive white supremacist violence. One form that took were racist terror lynchings: The Equal Justice Initiative has documented around 4,400 such lynchings between 1877 and 1950, most of them occurring between 1890 and 1920.
The level of biracial equality and democratic participation the South had experienced during Reconstruction would not be reached again until almost a full century later.
Lessons and implications from the demise of Reconstruction
History doesn’t move in circles, it doesn’t exactly repeat – it is accumulative. We are not facing the exact same challenges as people in previous eras, because we live in a world that already lived through those challenges and was shaped by them. That makes it difficult to draw clear-cut lessons and apply them directly to the present. But we can still learn from history. Studying the past can equip us with a better toolkit to tackle the present. Especially if we can identify meaningful historical reference points, they can help us understand the core challenges of our moment - the interests, dynamics, and contingencies that are shaping the present.
The fate of the first Reconstruction is such a crucial reference point – especially now that we are facing the rapid dismantling of the second attempt to reconstitute the nation around the principle of equality.
One crucial implication is that democratic progress – any attempt at leveling existing hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth – will inevitably lead to a massive countermobilization orchestrated by the forces of reaction. The framers of the Reconstruction Amendments understood this precisely. They sought revolutionary change. Their goal was not merely to restore a status quo ante, or to reform a system that wasn’t worth preserving; they aspired to transform the nation. Not as a project of idealistic utopianism, but as an exercise of practical realism. After what the country had been through, they saw a leap forward as the only viable option.
Such moments of transformational aspiration are rare. Too often, a timid class of political leaders makes avoiding “backlash” their overriding concern. But backlash politics, driven by a logic of defeatist appeasement and pre-emptive abandonment of justice and equality, is guaranteed to stifle egalitarian policies. The challenges and risks of pushing ahead with a democratizing agenda are real. But if “backlash” and “polarization” are inevitably the price to be paid for equality, we might as well do it right. Piecemeal reforms and half-measures will still attract the ire of those who simply will not accept egalitarian pluralism; and since they are easily dismantled, they will only leave the people who will suffer most from the countermobilization defenseless.
Multiracial democracy has never advanced through appeasement and persuasion. America’s first attempt to extend the democratic promise beyond white people was successful where and when the political coalition behind Reconstruction was willing to impose it against resistance they understood to be inevitable, against forces they recognized as enemies of democracy.
The promise of Reconstruction was left unfulfilled. The experiment didn’t last. That is another painful implication: No right, no democratic achievement is ever safe. No progress is irrevocable. History is not destined to move in a progressive direction. There is no arc, and there definitely is no ironclad law of the universe that says “We” can’t slide back.
That, however, does not mean progress is impossible. Even as the reactionary entrenchment won in the late nineteenth century, the fight was not over. Generations suffered under this regime. And it took decades of work, with uncertain outcome. But ultimately, courageous people achieved marvelous things: A Second Reconstruction, codified in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, with the 1965 Voting Rights Act as its crown jewel. Once again, America embarked on a dramatic experiment of democratic expansion that once again resulted not only in an explosion of Black political participation and minority representation, but also in social progress and economic empowerment. It turns out that if you extend the democratic promise to people, they will gladly and enthusiastically grasp the chance you offer. There is no more insidious lie than the idea that people who are denied political participation don’t want it or wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.
Unfortunately, the enemies of multiracial democracy understand all this precisely. That is why their countermobilization has been trying to roll back the rights revolution of the 1960s and has been targeting the Voting Rights Act, specifically, since the minute it was passed. They fear multiracial democracy – because they know it works.
About 4,000 words in – and still a long way to go until we get to our present. We will end Part I here and pick up the story in a Part II, which I will publish later this week. It will tackle, among other things: The rise of the Second Reconstruction, the impact of the Voting Rights Act, the crusade against the VRA as a crucial element of the broader reactionary countermobilization, and what America might look like as we are entering the second “Redemption.”
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Democracy is not self-executing.
Multiracial democracy in America is young, contested, and fragile.
The lesson of Reconstruction is that rights become real only when institutions can enforce them against countermobilization, procedural sabotage, and local veto power.
What you wrote in your essay is why the American War of Independence was in 1776. The American Revolution was from 1861-1865. After reconstruction the South was an authoritarian state until the VRA.