Because the Second Reconstruction eventually fulfilled the promises given to Black Americans after the Civil War, historians have referred to modern Civil Rights to the “Second Reconstruction.” The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, a second Bill of Rights for African Americans, were part of the second American Revolution. Reconstruction and these amendments sought to abolish black Americans’ subjugation at the hands of white people and grant them full citizenship rights in the nation they had helped to build. I do not believe it to be true, because this second Reconstruction would ultimately fail. Although, scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois would characterize it as a glorious failure (Hinton 117). The United States Constitution now explicitly recognizes African Americans’ rights, which was the second Reconstruction’s crowning achievement. These rights, however, have remained mainly abstract promises.
Blacks were given “equal protection of the laws” via the 14th Amendment, enacted in 1868. However, states often ignored the “equal protection” clause of the Amendment. When the Supreme Court concluded in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 that separated facilities were not by nature unequal, the statute was effectively rendered meaningless, and the Jim Crow segregation system thrived in the South (Hinton 263). The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, stated that citizens might not be denied the right to vote on the grounds of “race, color, or prior condition of slavery” (Hinton 3). This Amendment also granted voting rights to Blacks. However, states also discovered ways to circumvent this provision by implementing poll levies, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses (which stipulated that a man could vote only if his father or grandfather had voted). These policies were implemented to keep Black men from casting ballots. However, the judges maintained the state legislation since their language did not specifically target African Americans. Violence and intimidation were also deployed to prevent Black people from voting and excluding them from the political process.
The struggles of African Americans to obtain their rights, however, did not end with the broken promises of Reconstruction. The Niagara Movement in 1905, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and the National Urban League in 1911 are three examples of local and national civil rights organizations founded by Black men and women and their White allies to agitate for change (Hinton 23). The varied and steadfast efforts of numerous people and organizations would culminate in the modern Civil Rights Movement of 1954–1965 (Hinton 263). Multiple lawsuits, sit-ins, marches, and other nonviolent actions put pressure on the federal government and courts to uphold the guarantees of the Reconstruction amendments during this time. Because it fulfilled the promises given to Black Americans after the Civil War, some historians refer to the Civil Rights Movement as the “second Reconstruction.”
In its famous Brown v. Board of Education decision from 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the concept of “separate but equal” invalid, restoring the authority of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment (Hinton 23). Ten years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted by Congress, putting an end to Jim Crow by outlawing the treatment of Black people differently in employment and accommodations. African Americans were finally allowed to fully enjoy the right to vote that the 15th Amendment had granted them nearly a century earlier when the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, outlawing poll fees, literacy tests, and other discriminatory practices (Hinton 283). Countless foot soldiers like Robert Fox, who battled in the early battles of our country’s civil rights revolution, and recognized heroes like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., were victorious in the monumental civil rights changes of the 1950s and 1960s.
Overall, the Second Reconstruction cannot be regarded as the actual Civil Rights movement because it ultimately failed. The United States Constitution’s guarantees to African Americans about their rights mainly remained on paper. Republicans redistributed confiscated southern plantation acres to blacks through the Freedmen’s Bureau to put them on an equal footing with white farmers. The reached deal also gave Southern Blacks a long-term setback in their quest for equality.
Work Cited
Hinton, Elizabeth. The new black history: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction. Springer, 2016.