Search for "reconstruction"

The Birth of Glenn Beck’s Nation

By Kelly J. Baker

…y and the like joined it in the mid-twentieth century. Americans, from the Reconstruction Klan in the 1860s, the Know Nothings of the 1890s to the second Klan of the 1910s and 1920s, to home-grown Christian fascists of the 1930s, sought to protect a nation in peril from any perceived threat, be it Catholic, Jew, African American, or Communist. In my particular area of the study, the 1920s Klan, the Knights, recruited members with both warnings of…

This Year’s Best Books in African American Religion

By Jonathan L. Walton

…l the rich religious activity among African Americans in the Delta between Reconstruction and World War I. This account belies the widely accepted characterization of the post-Reconstruction era as the “nadir of black history.” Whether it was popularizing railroad travel as emblematic of black freedom and mobility, the embrace of fraternal orders, or the rise of consumer culture and its relationship to class respectability and gendered domesticity…

Candidate Sharron Angle Accuses Opponent of Idolatry

By Julie Ingersoll

…ionists see as wrong with civil government: Angle’s criticism is Christian Reconstructionism in a nutshell. As Reconstructionists see it, there are three spheres of institutional authority established by God: the family, the church and that civil government. Each of the institutions has specific responsibilities and when “men” look to the State to meet needs the State was not intended to meet, they are looking to the State for salvation and making…

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

By Yannick Marshall

…farmland ended up in white hands because of the “white work ethic” or that Reconstruction’s Black farms found today in white pockets got there fair and square. They will believe that the reason Harriett Tubman’s image will not appear on U.S. currency as planned is that the current administration has concerns about counterfeiting. Or that a president who bought an ad calling for the murder of exonerated Black youth and who, according to a family me…

Why Real Political Power Will Not Come From a Revived Religious Left

By Nicholas Laccetti

…— a strategy that W. E. B. Du Bois called, in his seminal 1935 text Black Reconstruction, “plantation politics.” During the Reconstruction period, Du Bois explains, plantation owners fought against the possibility of a new economic democracy by extending the slave system, pitting poor whites against black freedmen to divide the Southern working class in order to avoid the development of a unified, robust labor movement in the South after the Civi…

Rev. William Barber: Jazzman for Justice

By Peter Heltzel

…that the descendants of that revival were active participants in the post-Reconstruction Fusion Party, in which poor whites and formerly enslaved African Americans stood together against the tyranny of white-supremacist Democrats in North Carolina. It happens that fusion also characterized the emergent jazz music of the late 19th century. Jazz arose from a fusion of different musical forms, including slave songs, spirituals, blues, ragtime, Europ…

Confronting “Dangerous Memory,” Heeding the Power of the Moral Imagination

By Charlene Sinclair

Rev. William Barber’s book, The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement, is a refreshing primer on moral movement building. We progressives tend to generate our policy prescriptions on the grounds of their “rightness.” If we were honest with each other, we would acknowledge that we engage each other too much from the head and not enough from the heart, too much from policy particulars and not e…

Why Faith Needs Redemptive Struggle to Be Meaningful

By Liz Theoharis

…stice, that faith without redemptive struggle is dead. We all owe Rev. Barber a debt of gratitude, both for his leadership in the field and for this precious book, The Third Reconstruction. See here for Peter Laarman’s interview with Rev. William Barber, and here for the full range of responses….

A Moral Movement Where Everyone Is in For the Long Haul

By Maxine Phillips

…d woof of the same fabric. For us on the left, two challenges to his Third Reconstruction are also rooted in American myths. The first myth is that religion and politics don’t mix. The second is that when the going gets rough, we can always “light out for the territories,” that is, move on rather than dig in. Many liberal religionists worry about losing their tax exemption or are overwhelmed by the day-to-day work of ministering to society’s outca…

Rev. William Barber: Speaking “Truth that Empowers”

By Joshua L. Lazard

…shut up in his bones and prophetically declare this the time for a “Third Reconstruction” resonates with both my mind and my spirit. Such a kindling is rare in the age when identity politics rule the day. His righteous mind is un-bought and un-bossed—governed neither by corporate interest nor likes on Facebook or retweets on Twitter. I see him not as a singular prophet among the people, but in the spirit of Black Lives Matter, one out of the many…