We might be approaching a moment that resembles the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, historians and legal experts say. In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, big-name companies, some Democrats, and their allies have been pumping the brakes on the push for equality, prioritizing achieving peace with President-elect Donald Trump over protecting vulnerable communities.
Why the focus on the end of Reconstruction? Because it was a period marked by widespread acquiescence. The South and the North agreed that the country would be better off if it stopped fighting over Black equality, that it could get on with post-Civil War rebuilding if it buried the bloody flag of the Confederacy for good. There’s a reason Black Americans referred to the Compromise of 1877, which quashed Reconstruction, as the Great Betrayal.
“It wouldn’t have happened — we wouldn’t have lost seven decades of an ability to integrate ourselves into society politically, economically, and socially — if it hadn’t been for an agreement between the parties,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, told Capital B, nodding to the surge of Jim Crow laws that would disenfranchise and impoverish Black Americans from the 1890s until the 1960s.
She added, “It wasn’t just one party that came and overtook the dogged efforts of those who wanted to make sure that we weren’t set aside — there was an agreement.”
Reconstruction was our country’s first attempt at multiracial democracy. It was an era when Black men gained the right to vote and were elected to the U.S. Congress and to state legislatures, and when all Black Americans secured equal protection of the law.
The parallels between our past and our present are hard to ignore.
Consider a recent turn in the struggle for racial equality. Shortly after Trump’s win, Walmart, which was enthusiastic about advocating for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, announced that it was terminating some of its diversity, equity, and inclusion work, as it braces for an administration hostile to DEI. For instance, the company doesn’t plan on renewing its philanthropic initiative, the Center for Racial Equity. This reversal illuminates the fickleness of companies, which tend to go wherever the wind blows.
As a New York Times article laid out, this announcement is essentially Walmart picking a side. The company trusts that the Trump administration will “protect its friends and go after its enemies,” and, with this assessment in mind, has decided that it wants to be a friend.
Similarly, the senior minister of one of the most progressive churches in North Carolina was recently ousted for allegedly wanting “too much social justice,” per a deacon who resigned in protest. The actions of the church, seen as a haven for vulnerable communities in a state pursuing an authoritarian power grab, have observers wondering if it’s trying to position itself to get along with an anti-DEI movement that will only intensify under the next administration. (The church denies that it was engaging in retaliation.)
“What’s taking place is really a fight for the soul of Reconstruction,” Alanah Odoms, the executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, told Capital B, explaining that we’re witnessing a clash between efforts to expand rights and efforts to contract rights, as some maintain that the country should be more exclusionary. “I think that we’re in a dark period of contraction right now.”
Transgender Americans also are being hung out to dry. On the campaign trail, Trump pilloried transgender inclusion, insisting that Vice President Kamala Harris was for “they/them” while he was for “us.” He also inundated voters in swing states with ads painting his rival as an extremist because she vowed to uphold the law and support gender-affirming medical care for incarcerated people, and he lied that “the transgender thing” allows kids to go to school and return home just “a few days later with an operation.”
New findings snap into focus how marginalized this group is. According to data released in February, 35 homicides were committed against transgender or gender-expansive Americans in 2023. Of these, 80% involved a gun. Black transgender women suffered most of this violence — 50% of gun homicides in 2023 were of Black transgender women.
Additionally, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday heard a high-profile challenge to a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The case, a decision for which is expected by the end of June, could have major implications for transgender youth in Tennessee and in the more than 20 other states with similar prohibitions. The court seemed likely to uphold the Tennessee ban.
And yet, rather than give a full-throated defense of a constituency that’s so terrified of the forthcoming administration that its members are disseminating to-do lists to help people stay safe, some Democrats are backing away. They’re arguing that Trump won because Democrats took “far-left” positions when it came to gender and sexuality — never mind that Harris rarely broached the subject — and suggesting that the party ought to tamp down its messaging on transgender rights if this means that it could widen its tent.
(Likewise, after John Kerry lost to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential race, some Democrats blamed their colleagues’ support for gay marriage and reproductive justice, making it appear as if securing human dignity and safety was secondary to winning.)
This is the precise kind of behavior that unsettles Crenshaw — who’s also a law professor at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles — and makes her feel as if she’s stuck in a time machine that’s taking her back to the 1870s.
“When I look around and I’m not hearing what I want to hear about a rededication to inclusion and racial justice — when I’m not hearing a clear, vocal demand that we recover the values of a multiracial society, that we fight for those ideas and the policies that got us this far — I get really worried that we’re looking at a period that isn’t dissimilar to the period right after Reconstruction,” she said.
Steven Hahn, a historian at New York University whose research focuses on slavery, emancipation, and race, echoed some of Crenshaw’s sentiments. He said that this tension, so prominent over the past few weeks as many scramble to prepare for the Trump administration, is part of the ongoing crisis of U.S. democracy.
“It’s one thing to be inclusive in terms of who can vote or who can run for office. It’s another thing to be inclusive in terms of whose rights and safety set the agenda for policy” or get broader public attention and support, Hahn told Capital B. He added that “there’s a lot of blame” going around for Trump’s win: “Kamala Harris is getting blamed. [President] Joe Biden is getting blamed. Progressives are getting blamed. Voters of color are getting blamed.”
But pointing the finger or throwing vulnerable communities under the bus — communities that have long been the backbone of U.S. democracy — isn’t the way forward, according to analysts. The way forward lies in solidarity, in forging coalitions across various identity categories. That’s because the attacks likely coming under the next administration will be best fought by these groups together, rather than by each on its own.
“If there’s a period we ought to revisit to get lessons on what not to do, it’s the end of Reconstruction,” Crenshaw said. “We know now what people didn’t know then. We have an opportunity to learn from the past.”
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