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Newsela | Her viral Black Excellence-inspired routine rejects "cookie-cutter" gymnastics

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A "certain look" is prized in gymnastics, Dennis says. For years, she was told she didn't have it.

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Newsela | Racism declared public health issue in 145 cities and counties across 27 states

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The American Public Health Association, which tracks declarations of racism as a public health issue, counts 145 across 27 states - up from seven in 2019.

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Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992)

Marsha "Pay It No Mind" Johnson is known to many as the leader of the gay liberation movement. She led an uprising after members of the LGBTQ community were harassed at at the Stonewall Inn by members of the NYPD in 1969. Johnson was a successful drag queen and used her influence to lift up others, creating the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970, an organization that worked to find housing for homeless transgender youth.

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28 Civil Rights Leaders of Past and Present

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Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992) Marsha "Pay It No Mind" Johnson is known to many as the leader of the gay liberation movement. She led an uprising after members of the LGBTQ community were harassed at at the Stonewall Inn by members of the NYPD in 1969.

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MLA - Michals, Debra. "Ruby Bridges." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2015. Date accessed.

Chicago - Michals, Debra. "Ruby Bridges." National Women's History Museum." 2015. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ruby-bridges.

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Trailblazer Ruby Bridges was only six when she advanced the cause of civil rights in November 1960 when she became the first African American student to integrate an elementary school in the South. Learn more about her on womenshistory.org.

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Kirk Burkhalter, a former NYPD detective, examined the confrontation between Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman and rioters at the U.S. Capitol. (The Washington Post)

It was a video clip that captured not only the terror of the day, but the values at stake: a lone Black police officer in the marble halls of the U.S. Capitol building, facing down a mob of mostly White rioters who had stormed in bearing Confederate flags, weapons and vows to reclaim a lost election.

The footage captured by HuffPost political reporter Igor Bobic has gone viral in the past week, spurring people across the world to hail the officer as a hero. The U.S. Capitol Police have not publicly identified him, but three of his friends told The Washington Post that the officer is Eugene Goodman of Maryland, confirming what journalists at CNN and elsewhere have reported.

On Thursday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers said they would introduce a bill to award Goodman the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest awards a civilian can receive in the United States.

For 85 tense seconds on Jan. 6, Goodman tried to hold back dozens of rioters, according to the video, twice retreating up a flight of stairs. Police experts say he wasn't fleeing, but luring the mob away from the Senate chambers, where lawmakers were sheltering and armed officers - including one with a semiautomatic weapon - were securing the doors.

His actions likely preempted what could have been a violent confrontation, Kirk D. Burkhalter, a professor at New York Law School and a former New York City police officer, said in an interview.

The toll from the attack - five deaths, including a Capitol Police officer, a protester shot by police and three who died of medical emergencies - could have been far higher if Goodman had made different choices, said Burkhalter, who reviewed the video at The Post's request.

"These folks had zip ties," he said, referencing images of the rioters holding zip-tie handcuffs that have emerged since the attack. "It's not unreasonable to say that they were ready to take hostages. . . . Officer Goodman really helped to avoid a tremendous tragedy."

Officer Sicknick, dead after assault in Capitol, protected with a kind touch

Friends who have talked to Goodman since the riot, including two fellow officers and a former colleague, said he has been ambivalent about the limelight. Generally private and reserved, the D.C. native has started to worry about becoming a potential target of far-right extremist groups that have vowed to return to D.C. this weekend and for next week's inauguration.

"He said he'd do the same thing again. He's not looking for any accolades," said one friend, a Capitol Police officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized to speak on the issue. "But the attention is a little scary for him."

Neither Goodman nor a Capitol Police spokeswoman responded to requests for an interview.

Goodman, 40, grew up in Southeast Washington and served in the Army from 2002 to 2006, deploying with the 101st Airborne Division to Iraq for a year, said Cynthia Smith, a service spokeswoman. His awards include a combat infantryman badge, indicating he was in ground combat.

Those who know Goodman said his decision to lead the rioters away instead of directly engaging them reflects his military experience.

"He was diverting people from getting on the Senate floor and getting hostages. It was the smartest thing that he could have ever done," his colleague said. "I don't know that many people who can think on their feet like that. . . . His quick thinking enabled those senators to get to safety."

A close friend of Goodman's, who asked to be identified by his first name, Terry, out of fear of being targeted by far-right extremists, said the officer has a reputation for being a calm leader during emergencies.

"I've always said, if bullets start ripping through, I'm finding Goodman," said the friend, who has spoken to Goodman several times since the incident. "He's been in hostile firefights, so he knows how to keep his head."

Trump defiant, unapologetic about his role inciting the Capitol mob

Burkhalter, the New York professor, said Goodman appears in the video to be doing three tactical things simultaneously: leading rioters away from the Senate chambers, coordinating for backup on the second-floor landing, and exercising extreme restraint to prevent injury or loss of life.

In the first part of the video, when Goodman retreats up a flight of stairs, he only briefly turns his back to the rioters, Burkhalter notes. Most of the time, he's backing away with his eyes toward the mob, suggesting that he is not running away from them but attempting to lead them somewhere. When Goodman reaches the second-floor landing, he glances to his left, where the entrance to the Senate chambers is located.

At this point, he makes a risky decision, Burkhalter said. He opens his collapsible baton - which had fallen on the floor earlier - and lightly pushes the man leading the mob of rioters, later identified as Douglas A.Jensen, 41, from Des Moines.

Jensen briefly looks toward the Senate chambers, then follows Goodman, who is walking in the other direction and toward backup. In anindictment unsealed Wednesday, prosecutors said Jensen told investigators he positioned himself at the front of the mob because he wanted his T-shirt, promoting the right-wing conspiracy-theory group QAnon, to be visible. He faces charges including trespassing, obstructing police during a civil disorder and resisting officers.

"In pushing him, the lead rioter, he's attempting to get him to follow along," Burkhalter said of Goodman. "He's trying to bait them."

Bobic, the reporter who filmed the video, said he realized days after the attack that the Senate doors were sealed just minutes before Goodman had lured the rioters away. "If they had just gone right instead of left," Bobic said in an interview, the intruders might have reached the lawmakers.

Keith Taylor, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and another former New York City police officer who reviewed the video, said Goodman showed significant situational awareness. Even as he spoke and beckoned to the rioters, he was communicating with co-workers through a radio attached to his uniform, Taylor said, giving them updates on where he was and where he was headed.

By the end of the video, he appears to have led the rioters to another area, where several other officers were prepared for a standoff. The mob can be heard yelling at Goodman and the other officers and calling them "traitors."

FBI warned of 'war' at Capitol, contradicting claims there was no indication of violence

Goodman's restraint is also notable, Burkhalter said, given the intruders had broken into the Capitol building, were predominantly White and bore symbols of the Confederacy. Many have since been identified as members of white-nationalist organizations and militant right-wing organizations, such as the Proud Boys.

Usually, Burkhalter said, when Black people are being stalked by White people with Confederate flags, it "doesn't end up well for the Black folks."

Terry, who is White, said he and Goodman have talked about race, and about the conflicts Goodman feels as a Black law enforcement officer. "For him, it's always like, 'I'm too Black for the badge, but too blue for the brothers,' " Terry said.

The video has drawn waves of praise for Goodman online. Ben Crump, the attorney for the families of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, tweeted that Goodman should be awarded the Public Safety Officer Medal of Valor. Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) said Congress "owes him a debt of gratitude." And former Senate candidate Jaime Harrison, who challenged Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R) in South Carolina, declared that Goodman's "judgment & heroism may have saved our Republic."

Bobic said that if he gets to meet Goodman, he'd like to convey the hundreds of thousands of messages he has received from people worldwide about the video. But he'd also like to thank him personally for protecting him.

"If he wasn't there," Bobic said, "I would have ran flat-footed into the mob."

Goodman's attitude toward his job has remained the same despite his newfound fame, his friends said, adding that during the attack, he was focused on defusing the threat to lawmakers, not his own safety.

"My job is to protect and serve," he told co-workers after the video of him went viral. "And on that day, I was protecting."

Dan Lamothe, Spencer S. Hsu and Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.

U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died after assault on Capitol, protected with a kind touch

Capitol Police officer who was on duty during the riot has died by suicide, his family says

Capitol siege was planned online. Trump supporters now planning the next one.

Updated January 17, 2021

Complete coverage: Pro-Trump mob storms Capitol building

Security
Live updates: State capitols, D.C. brace for potentially violent protests
Arrests: Here are some of the people charged

What happened on Jan. 6

Video timeline: 41 minutes of fear from inside the Capitol siege
Exclusive: Capitol Police intelligence report warned three days before attack that 'Congress itself' could be targeted
Police turning in police: Off-duty police were part of the Capitol mob

Attacked with bear spray and their own batons: D.C. police describe brutal and chaotic moments

Trump's second impeachment

Unprecedented: House hands Trump a second impeachment, this time with GOP support

Senate impeachment whip count: Where Democrats and Republicans stand
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A Black officer faced down a mostly White mob at the Capitol. Meet Eugene Goodman.

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It was a video clip that captured not only the terror of the day, but the values at stake: a lone Black police officer in the marble halls of the U.S. Capitol building, facing down a mob of mostly White rioters who had stormed in bearing Confederate flags, weapons and vows to reclaim a lost election.

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Newsela | Why black culture thrives alongside rampant racism

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Mainstream recognition of black pride through art is growing despite racism. This might seem odd but it is actually a modern twist on the Harlem Renaissance of the early-20th century.

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NEW YORK (AP) - "Sesame Street" has always pressed for inclusion. Now in the wake of the national reckoning on race, it's going further - teaching children to stand up against racism.

Sesame Workshop - the nonprofit, educational organization behind "Sesame Street" - will later this month air the half-hour anti-racist special "The Power of We" and hopes families will watch together.

The special defines racism for younger viewers and shows how it can be hurtful. It urges children who encounter racism or hear someone else be the victim of it to call it out. "When you see something that's wrong, speak up and say, 'That's wrong' and tell an adult," 6-year-old Gabrielle the Muppet advises.

The special, composed of little skits and songs in a Zoom-like format, will stream on HBO Max and PBS Kids and air on PBS stations beginning Oct. 15.

In one animated skit, a Black Muppet is told by a white Muppet that he can't dress up like a superhero because they're only white. Though hurt, the Black Muppet nevertheless refuses to stop playing superheroes, saying they can come in all colors. The white Muppet soon apologizes. "Racism hurts and it's wrong," is the message.

In the song "How Do You Know?" racism is dealt with head-on. "Hey, Elmo, how would you feel if I said, 'I don't like you 'cause I don't like the color red?'" sings Tamir, a Black, 8-year-old Muppet. Elmo responds: "Elmo wouldn't care what you said 'cause Elmo is proud, proud to be red!" It concludes with the lines: "Speak up. Say something. Don't give in."

"We believe that this moment calls for a direct discussion about racism to help children grasp the issues and teach them that they are never too young to be 'upstanders' for themselves, one another, and their communities," said Kay Wilson Stallings, executive vice president of creative and production at Sesame Workshop, in a statement.

Current and former Sesame Street human cast members Alan, Charlie, Chris and Gordon take part in the special, alongside celebrity guests Yara Shahidi, the star of "grown-ish;" "Hamilton" star Christopher Jackson; and Grammy-nominated singer Andra Day.

Viewers are offered tips to help their communities unite, including chalk drawings, making positive signs and going to sing-a-longs. When outside, all the puppets wear masks, even the letter puppets. The special concludes with the slogan "Listen. Act. Unite."

Sesame Workshop has included online resources for parents to help guide conversations with their child about race, including talking, singing and breathing together. "Sharing can help us feel better," is one tip. There are also downloadable pictures to color and a certificate with a place to put the name of an upstander.

"Sesame Street," which last year celebrated its 50th anniversary, has a history of explaining the world to children, tackling everything from foster care to substance abuse. The latest special comes on the heels of "Sesame Street" contributing to "Coming Together: Standing Up To Racism," a CNN town hall special in June hosted by Van Jones and Erica Hill.

___

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

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'Speak up!' - 'Sesame Street' tackles racism in TV special

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NEW YORK (AP) - "Sesame Street" has always pressed for inclusion. Now in the wake of the national reckoning on race, it's going further - teaching children to stand up against racism. Sesame Workshop - the nonprofit, educational organization behind "Sesame Street" - will later this month air the half-hour anti-racist special "The Power of We" and hopes families will watch together.

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Black Americans are underrepresented in high-paying jobs

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 54% of employed Asians worked in management, professional, and related occupations - the highest-paying major occupational category - compared with 41% of employed whites, 31% employed Blacks, and 22% of employed Hispanics.

This, in part, can be explained by racist hiring practices that kept Blacks out of business for decades under Jim Crow. It can also be explained by more subtle forms of prejudice today.

One Harvard University study found that when Blacks and Asians "whitened" their resumes - for example, used "American" or "white"-sounding names - they got more callbacks for corporate interviews. Twenty-five percent of Black candidates received callbacks from their whitened resumes, while only 10% got calls when they left ethnic details on their resume.

In addition, many companies rely on employee social networks for referrals, which can be problematic if your company is largely white, diversity experts told Business Insider. One survey found that three quarters of white employees don't have any non-white friends.

Similarly, overall income for Black Americans was about 42% lower than for whites in 2018.

There's a similar disparity at the household level. Lower incomes mean that the poverty rate for Black families is over twice that of white families.

One common way to illustrate the gender and race wage gaps is through looking at "equal pay days" for different groups.

Equal pay day for a particular racial or gender group marks the extra days someone in that group has to work into the next year to earn what the typical white man earned in the previous year.

Based on income figures from 2018, it would take the median black woman worker 226 extra days into a new year to earn what a median white male worker made in the previous year.

Educational opportunities remain starkly split by race.

A study by the Department of Education showed that in 2013, Black high school students were only a bit more than half as likely as white students to have any Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate credit, and only about a third as likely to have AP/IB credit for math.

As with income, intergenerational educational mobility varies widely between racial groups.

This chart, based on another study from Opportunity Insights, looks at the likelihood that a child whose parents had only a high school diploma goes on to earn a college degree or higher.

Only 15% of Black students from less-educated households went on to finish college, well below the 25% of white children who earned a degree.

Black men are roughly five times more likely to be imprisoned than their white counterparts - and nearly 13 times as likely in the 18-19 age group.

The most recent numbers available on imprisonment rates come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' analysis of 2018 data, which showed that Black men aged 18-19 were 12.7 times as likely to be imprisoned as their white peers, and Black men of all ages were roughly 5.8 times more likely to be imprisoned than white men.

A Pew Research Center analysis of the data showed that the Black imprisonment rate has actually dropped by 34% since 2006 - the greatest decline across all races.

Yet even still, Black Americans - and particularly Black men - remain more likely than any other group to be imprisoned. For every 100,000 Black men there are 2,272 inmates, whereas for every 100,000 white men there are just 392 inmates.

Marijuana usage rates are similar between white and Black Americans, yet Black Americans are 3.64 times more likely to get arrested on marijuana possession charges.

According to the federal government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, marijuana usage between Black and white Americans is similar. Just 18% of Black people over the age of 12 in 2018 reported using marijuana within the past year, while 17% of white people over the age of 12 reported the same.

But the usage rate is where the similarities end - that same year, Black Americans were arrested 3.6 times more often than white Americans for marijuana possession, according to an American Civil Liberties Union analysis of FBI and US Census data.

The racial disparity in marijuana arrests has actually gotten worse in recent years, even though more states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana.

According to the ACLU's analysis of marijuana arrest data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, racial disparities in marijuana arrests have continued in every state.

Despite widespread reforms to state marijuana policies, the racial disparity has even gotten worse over the years, not better. For instance, in 2010, Black people were 3.31 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people, and over the years the rate ticked up to 3.64 in 2018.

The marijuana arrests that continue to the present day have disproportionately "caused profound and far-reaching harm on the people arrested, convicted, and/or incarcerated for marijuana offenses," the ACLU wrote. "It has been a colossal waste of money and law enforcement resources that has only deepened the divide between communities and their governments and increased public hurt rather than safety."

Black people are overwhelmingly more likely than white people to be under parole supervision - and they're more likely to be sent back to prison for minor infractions.

Research from Columbia University's Justice Lab has shown that Black people are far more likely than white people to be under parole supervision. Though the federal prison system has largely abolished parole, most states still retain the practice of releasing some inmates from prison sentences early in exchange for heavy supervision while they try to get back on their feet.

New York state has a particularly extreme racial disparity when it comes to parole supervision. Black people are 6.77 times more likely to be under parole supervision than white people, the Justice Lab found. They are also 4.99 times more likely than white people to be re-incarcerated due to "technical" parole violations, meaning that they had parole revoked due to minor infractions such as missing an appointment, rather than committing a new crime.

A Justice Lab report said parole supervision has also had an unequal effect on Black people - even though some of the supervision requirements may seem neutral or sensible, they may be far harder for people in Black communities to abide by through no fault of their own.

For instance, one common parole requirement is for parolees to stay away from people who have felony convictions. Yet an estimated one-third of Black men have felony convictions. That means parolees could be ordered to stay away from friends, family members, and neighbors.

"People on parole ... may be forced to choose between obeying the rules on one hand, or, on the other, risking a parole violation by spending time with relatives and friends who could be valuable sources of support, stability, housing, or employment connections," the Justice Lab report said.

Roughly half of those fatally shot by police are white, but Black Americans are fatally shot at a disproportionate rate compared to their representation in the US population.

The Washington Post has compiled one of the most thorough datasets available when it comes to fatal police shootings, and it has sparked debate over what it means when it comes to racial bias in police killings.

The data show that more than half of the people fatally shot by police in America within the last five years were actually white - but fatal police shootings of Black people were disproportionately high, considering they account for roughly 13% of the US population.

As of June 12, 2,469 white people had been fatally shot since 2015 at rate of 13 per million, whereas 1,293 Black people were fatally shot at a rate of 31 per million.

The database also comes with a number of other qualifiers - namely, that it tracks only fatal police shootings, not fatal police encounters in general. So the deaths of Black men like George Floyd, which occurred after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, have not been included in the dataset, nor have the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, who died from a police chokehold, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore, who died of spinal injuries he suffered in a police van.

It's also worth pointing out that every fatal police shooting included in the database has its own unique set of circumstances that may or may not have justified a shooting. For instance, the database includes Omar Mateen, the mass shooter who killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub in 2016 before police fatally shot him.

The majority of fatal police shootings - 4,037 out of the 5,403 people fatally shot by police in the last five years - occurred when a suspect had either a gun or a knife.

Though the presence of a weapon does not in and of itself mean each of those police shootings was justified (for example, the database includes the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile, who was legally armed and obeyed the officer's commands during a traffic stop), officers are generally permitted to use deadly force when they believe a person poses a serious threat of injury or death.

But even when narrowing the data down to fatal police shootings of unarmed people, it shows a similar story as the aggregate data. Of the 352 instances where police fatally shot unarmed people, 145 of those people were white and 123 were Black (63 were Hispanic and 21 were designated "other" or "unknown.") - that's a rate of 10.7 white deaths per 10 million, and 30.1 Black deaths per 10 million.

Keep reading

More: Features Racism Education Unemployment

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26 simple charts to show friends and family who aren't convinced racism is still a problem in America

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Black Americans are underrepresented in high-paying jobs The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 54% of employed Asians worked in management, professional, and related occupations - the highest-paying major occupational category - compared with 41% of employed whites, 31% employed Blacks, and 22% of employed Hispanics.

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Americans were living through history in 2020 as the country was forced to reconcile the past and the present. The Covid-19 pandemic, which many had considered a "great equalizer," paralyzed the world and Black, Latino and Native American communities were among the hardest hit. Racist attacks against Asians in the US were also on the rise. Jogging, bird-watching or calling 911 while Black felt dangerous and George Floyd 's killing by a police officer shook Americans out of whatever made them numb to racism and police brutality.

No matter where you turned, you couldn't ignore reality. America was the epicenter of a racial reckoning.

Within days, people joined more than 10,000 demonstrations nationwide and a movement to demand reform in police departments across the country quickly followed. Confederate monuments were toppled. TV and sports arenas were not exempt from the call for social justice, and athletes were among the leading voices in the fight for racial equality.

Throughout the year, US law enforcement warned about a growing threat and concern that the rise of White supremacist groups had become the biggest domestic terrorism challenge.

By November, people turned from protesting in the streets to protesting at the polls and Black, Latino and Native Americans voters helped flipped some states blue.

Look back at the moments in politics, policing and culture that defined the extraordinary year in which America was forced to confront racism - and in some cases moved the needle toward change.

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Year in review. As the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the US, Black, Latino and Native Americans were among the hardest hit and Asians became the targets of racist attacks in 2020. The killings of George Floyd and others reignited the outcry that Black Lives Matter and thousands protested across the US.

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Experts say there is little difference between apartheid and Jim Crow.

LONDON -- Bongani Sibeko was just a toddler when he and his family were forced to flee their home in apartheid South Africa, as Black men, women and children were dying at the hands of authorities upholding the country's legal system of racial segregation.

As the son of revolutionaries, he found things weren't much different in the United States when they moved to New York City in the 1970s. Although apartheid wasn't the law of the land there, he said he grew up as a Black man knowing that if he encountered police on the streets, "there was a very good chance I would not make it home."

"Cops [in New York City] used to drive around at night looking for young Black folks to beat the hell out of," Bongani Sibeko, now 59, told ABC News in a recent telephone interview. "I was a victim of that and so was a majority of my friends."

Promised as the land of opportunity, America has long heralded itself as the world's beacon of democracy, freedom and progress. But many Black Africans and African Americans alike see the United States in a different light, saying the country's racist past is still very much a part of its present and that the recent death of George Floyd in police custody is a global tipping point for systemic racism. Africa-based experts also point out close parallels between the plight of Black people in America and in southern Africa.

"The distinction between first-, second- and third-world countries is no longer a stable set of distinctions, because from the founding of the United States to the present there's always been an excluded, dehumanized population," Dr. Joel Modiri, a senior lecturer in jurisprudence at South Africa's University of Pretoria, told ABC News in a recent telephone interview. "Apartheid and Jim Crow are really no different."

While some are holding out hope that the groundswell of support from millions in the United States will propel systemic change through the Black Lives Matter movement, others are looking beyond America's shores to Africa for fresh perspective and in some cases a fresh start.

Apartheid vs. Jim Crow

American history is a violent one. When European explorers and settlers arrived hundreds of years ago on the shores of what they called the "New World," they claimed the land as their own and slaughtered Indigenous tribes in the process. The Atlantic slave trade was born when European colonizers kidnapped Africans and began selling them as slaves to the British colonies in North America in 1619.

The United States abolished slavery in 1865, after the American Civil War had ended. But the racial segregation and economic discrimination of Black people was enforced openly in the South until the mid-20th century through state and local legislation known as Jim Crow laws.

Experts said racial inequality remains deeply entrenched in American society today, as a lingering legacy of slavery and segregation.

"My view is that the United States has structural racism," Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Center for Democracy and Development in Abuja, Nigeria, told ABC News in a recent telephone interview. "The whole society is structured against basically the Black community, that has a very high level of incarceration and has very brutal policing."

For instance, Black adults make up just 12% of the U.S. population but represented 33% of the country's sentenced prison population in 2018, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical agency of the U.S. Justice Department.

And though there is little research on police violence and racial bias, a peer-reviewed study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine in November 2016, which examined data from a public health surveillance system on the use of lethal force by on-duty law enforcement officers from 2009 to 2012 in 17 U.S. states, found that the victims were disproportionately Black -- 32% -- with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among Blacks than whites.

Experts said South Africa shares many of the features of structural racism that are found in the United States. When the National Party gained power in South Africa after the 1948 general election, its all-white government immediately started implementing its apartheid policy of racial segregation and economic discrimination against non-whites in the country as well as in the territory of South West Africa, the name for modern-day Namibia when it was under South African rule.

"South Africa really is unique because it's the place where we've had the most sustained period of white supremacy," Modiri told ABC News.

The system of apartheid was dismantled in the early 1990s through a series of bilateral negotiations between the National Party and the African National Congress, the leading anti-apartheid political movement at the time. Nelson Mandela, president of the African National Congress party, was then elected as the country's first Black head of state during the 1994 general election, the first in which South African citizens of all races were allowed to vote. The African National Congress has been the ruling party of post-apartheid South Africa ever since.

However, experts said white South Africans have retained economic, social and cultural power, enjoying a far better standard of living and quality of life than their non-white counterparts. National Transfer Accounts data from 2015 shows the average lifetime work-related earnings for whites peaks at over 300,000 South African rand per year, while for non-whites the peak is 70,000, according to a recent paper by the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research.

"So in a way, Black South Africans here -- although a numerical majority -- are nonetheless still a political, social and economic minority," Modiri said, "not unlike African Americans."

Police brutality also remains an issue in post-apartheid South Africa as well as in other African nations, including Kenya and Nigeria.

"This brutality is not structured racially but it is structured against the poor in society," Ibrahim told ABC News. "The African police systems never succeeded in making the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial police and retained a lot of the brutality and illegalities associated with colonial police."

Experts agreed that the only major distinction between the apartheid system and Jim Crow is the fact that Black people make up a majority of the population in South Africa, while they are the minority in the United States.

"Black South Africans and Americans are bound together in a long history of racial segregation, and it has not ended" Modiri said. "The struggle against white supremacy is a transnational one."

From Johannesburg to New York City

The year was 1963 and Bongani Sibeko's father, David Sibeko, was a rising member of the Pan Africanist Congress, a Black South African political movement that had broken away from the African National Congress. Both groups were working to end racial segregation and white majority rule in South Africa, and they had taken up arms in the wake of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when the national police force opened fire on a group of unarmed Black protesters, killing 69 of them.

As commander of the Pan Africanist Congress' paramilitary unit in the Vaal area, David Sibeko devised a plan to sabotage a train carrying South Africa's then-minister of justice, who had allegedly ordered the secret hangings of more than a dozen anti-apartheid activists. But he was captured on the night of the operation and held in detention for months.

David Sibeko was ultimately acquitted of the charges, and the Pan Africanist Congress leadership advised him to go into exile with his wife and children. Bongani Sibeko was 3 at the time.

The family was smuggled out of the country via a train from Johannesburg. When they eventually arrived at a refugee camp in Botswana, a bomb allegedly planted by South Africa's apartheid regime tore through the offices. So they had to stay on the move.

"They were after my father," Bongani Sibeko told ABC News.

From there, they traveled to Zambia and then Tanzania. They moved to London in 1968, when David Sibeko was appointed head of the Pan Africanist Congress' mission to Europe and the Americas. A few years later, he became the group's permanent observer at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, in association with the U.N. Special Committee Against Apartheid.

The family put down roots in a predominately Black neighborhood on the Upper West Side. Bongani Sibeko, who was 13 at the time, recalled knowing that he was South African but still feeling "amongst my own." Both his parents became involved with African American grassroots movements.

As a young Black man growing up in the United States, Bongani Sibeko said he had to quickly learn the rules of survival when dealing with law enforcement. He said his first brush with New York City police happened just after they had moved there, when his mother sent him out to buy groceries on Broadway.

"As I got onto Broadway, I saw a lot of people gathered around, police were everywhere," he recalled. "I saw this one cop and, you know, I basically asked him, 'Officer, what's going on?' He looked at me, spat at me and he said, 'F--- you n----! Get the hell out of here!'"

That encounter set the tone for the rest of his young adult life in New York City, he said, including one instance when he was beaten up in the street by seven white officers who he said had baited him into a confrontation.

"There's that moment that your life is at the cop's mercy, and if there's more than one you know that you're in serious trouble," he told ABC News. "One thing you have to understand is, your life is on the line."

How Africa reacted to George Floyd

Over the years, there have been several high-profile cases of police using deadly force against Black people that have energized America's debate on racism and inequality. The most recent was George Floyd.

Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old Black man, died in Minneapolis on May 25 after a white police officer was filmed kneeling on his neck as three other officers watched. His death has sparked anti-racism protests and calls for police reform across the United States and around the world, including in Africa. The continent voiced its anger in a statement released on May 29 through its regional bloc, the African Union, describing Floyd's death as an act of "murder."

The chair of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, condemned Floyd's killing and urged "authorities in the United States of America to intensify their efforts to ensure the total elimination of all forms of discrimination based on race or ethnic origin."

Then in June, Burkina Faso's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva penned a letter on behalf of 54 African nations, asking the U.N. Human Rights Council for an "urgent debate" on "racially inspired human rights violations, police brutality against people of African descent and the violence against the peaceful protests that call for these injustices to stop."

Although the letter called for a debate on racism around the world, Ambassador Dieudonne Desire Sougouri highlighted the situation in the United States, saying that Floyd's death "is unfortunately not an isolated incident, with many previous cases of unarmed persons of African descent suffering the same fate due to unchecked police brutality."

"The protests the world is witnessing are a rejection of the fundamental racial inequality and discrimination that characterize life in the United States for Black people, and other people of color," Sougouri wrote.

Experts said the widespread outrage over Floyd's death and the ensuing global support for the Black Lives Matter movement give reason for cautious hope, but substantial and meaningful change in the United States would be difficult. The same is true for post-apartheid South Africa.

"When a system becomes so deeply entrenched, it becomes harder and harder to uproot it," Modiri told ABC News. "The nature of the racial antagonism and racial conflict, and the trauma and the damage that racism has done in both the United States and in South Africa is fundamentally irreparable. It's unlikely that we can ever come out of it the same."

Still, Modiri added that "we should always be hopeful when communities of people refuse to accept the way things are."

Experts noted how the widening rift between liberals and conservatives in the United States has made legislative reform a challenge.

"I've seen many such demonstrations in the past and they never led to reform," Ibrahim told ABC News. "It's important for the Black Lives Matter movement to forge alliances with liberal Americans so they can sustain movement for a longer time, create more traction and, above all, ensure that the protests would be sustained up to the level where reforms are introduced."

Some 'look to Africa to find our roots'

When the coronavirus pandemic hit earlier this year and countries around the world began closing borders, Rashad McCrorey found himself at a crossroads.

The 40-year-old New York City native was in Ghana for a trip organized by his tourism company, Africa Cross Culture, which specializes in bringing Black Americans and the African diaspora to visit the continent. He could either return home immediately or stay in Ghana indefinitely. He chose the latter.

"I did some soul-searching," McCrorey told ABC News in a recent telephone interview. "I felt like I could run my business remotely and not only survive in Ghana but thrive out here."

Ghana, a former slave trading hub, has long advocated for Africans and those of African descent abroad to return to the continent. Many Black Americans, such as civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois, settled there in the 1960s. Last year, the West African nation launched the "Year of Return, Ghana 2019" on the 400th anniversary of slaves being brought to the United States with the goal of encouraging visits.

Reports estimate thousands of African Americans live in Ghana's capital of Accra, some looking to escape racism and other strife in the United States.

As civil unrest unfolds back home in America, McCrorey said he's confident he made the right decision to stay.

"It's the same merry-go-round," he said. "I saw the same thing in 2014."

In 2014, McCrorey was among thousands of protesters who took to the streets following the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed 43-year-old Black man who famously shouted "I can't breathe" as a white officer was filmed putting him in a chokehold while arresting him in the New York City borough of Staten Island. Black Lives Matter demonstrations soon spread across the country and the globe.

Although the officer involved in Garner's death is no longer patrolling the streets, McCrorey expressed frustration that there has been no real reform or structural change.

"Over time, things calm down, people go back to their regular lives until the next outrage happens," he told ABC News.

McCrorey visited Africa for the first time a few weeks after Garner's death. He fell in love with the country of Ghana and its people, and the trip inspired him to start his back-to-Africa travel company.

McCrorey described the experience of returning to the continent as an African American as healing and revitalizing, even if it's only for a visit. He said it's empowering to be surrounded by people who look like you in all aspects of society, from street vendors and shop owners to doctors, lawyers and politicians.

"We look to Africa to find our roots," he said. "We can look at Mother Africa as a rehab center to kind of get out of this systematic oppression."

'Without the world, we would have never been freed'

Bongani Sibeko had not yet turned 19 when his father was murdered.

David Sibeko had risen through the ranks of the Pan Africanist Congress, becoming a leading member of the group's central committee and being appointed director of foreign affairs. Meanwhile, he was doing important work for the U.N. Security Council and investigating South Africa's apartheid regime -- all of which put a target on his back.

On June 12, 1979, David Sibeko was assassinated during a meeting in Tanzania by sleeper agents of the apartheid regime who had infiltrated the Pan Africanist Congress, according to Bongani Sibeko. He was 39, leaving behind his wife and their four children.

Nearly 15 years after his father's death, Bongani Sibeko left New York City and moved back to South Africa when apartheid had ended. He has lived there ever since and said he is a proponent of Africans and the diaspora returning to the motherland.

"Our continent has been robbed of its people, and they should be welcomed back home," Bongani Sibeko told ABC News.

He expressed hope in the global momentum and support of America's Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of Floyd's death, recalling how the world in the same way backed the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

"This is a very emotional time for me because it reflects the global support that's happening for George Floyd and the plight of African Americans, it's very similar to the struggle we faced in that we did not struggle alone," he said. "Without the world, we would have never been freed."

LONDON -- Bongani Sibeko was just a toddler when he and his family were forced to flee their home in apartheid South Africa, as Black men, women and children were dying at the hands of authorities upholding the country's legal system of racial segregation.

As the son of revolutionaries, he found things weren't much different in the United States when they moved to New York City in the 1970s. Although apartheid wasn't the law of the land there, he said he grew up as a Black man knowing that if he encountered police on the streets, "there was a very good chance I would not make it home."

"Cops [in New York City] used to drive around at night looking for young Black folks to beat the hell out of," Bongani Sibeko, now 59, told ABC News in a recent telephone interview. "I was a victim of that and so was a majority of my friends."

Promised as the land of opportunity, America has long heralded itself as the world's beacon of democracy, freedom and progress. But many Black Africans and African Americans alike see the United States in a different light, saying the country's racist past is still very much a part of its present and that the recent death of George Floyd in police custody is a global tipping point for systemic racism. Africa-based experts also point out close parallels between the plight of Black people in America and in southern Africa.

"The distinction between first-, second- and third-world countries is no longer a stable set of distinctions, because from the founding of the United States to the present there's always been an excluded, dehumanized population," Dr. Joel Modiri, a senior lecturer in jurisprudence at South Africa's University of Pretoria, told ABC News in a recent telephone interview. "Apartheid and Jim Crow are really no different."

While some are holding out hope that the groundswell of support from millions in the United States will propel systemic change through the Black Lives Matter movement, others are looking beyond America's shores to Africa for fresh perspective and in some cases a fresh start.

Apartheid vs. Jim Crow

American history is a violent one. When European explorers and settlers arrived hundreds of years ago on the shores of what they called the "New World," they claimed the land as their own and slaughtered Indigenous tribes in the process. The Atlantic slave trade was born when European colonizers kidnapped Africans and began selling them as slaves to the British colonies in North America in 1619.

The United States abolished slavery in 1865, after the American Civil War had ended. But the racial segregation and economic discrimination of Black people was enforced openly in the South until the mid-20th century through state and local legislation known as Jim Crow laws.

Experts said racial inequality remains deeply entrenched in American society today, as a lingering legacy of slavery and segregation.

"My view is that the United States has structural racism," Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Center for Democracy and Development in Abuja, Nigeria, told ABC News in a recent telephone interview. "The whole society is structured against basically the Black community, that has a very high level of incarceration and has very brutal policing."

For instance, Black adults make up just 12% of the U.S. population but represented 33% of the country's sentenced prison population in 2018, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical agency of the U.S. Justice Department.

And though there is little research on police violence and racial bias, a peer-reviewed study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine in November 2016, which examined data from a public health surveillance system on the use of lethal force by on-duty law enforcement officers from 2009 to 2012 in 17 U.S. states, found that the victims were disproportionately Black -- 32% -- with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among Blacks than whites.

Experts said South Africa shares many of the features of structural racism that are found in the United States. When the National Party gained power in South Africa after the 1948 general election, its all-white government immediately started implementing its apartheid policy of racial segregation and economic discrimination against non-whites in the country as well as in the territory of South West Africa, the name for modern-day Namibia when it was under South African rule.

"South Africa really is unique because it's the place where we've had the most sustained period of white supremacy," Modiri told ABC News.

The system of apartheid was dismantled in the early 1990s through a series of bilateral negotiations between the National Party and the African National Congress, the leading anti-apartheid political movement at the time. Nelson Mandela, president of the African National Congress party, was then elected as the country's first Black head of state during the 1994 general election, the first in which South African citizens of all races were allowed to vote. The African National Congress has been the ruling party of post-apartheid South Africa ever since.

However, experts said white South Africans have retained economic, social and cultural power, enjoying a far better standard of living and quality of life than their non-white counterparts. National Transfer Accounts data from 2015 shows the average lifetime work-related earnings for whites peaks at over 300,000 South African rand per year, while for non-whites the peak is 70,000, according to a recent paper by the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research.

"So in a way, Black South Africans here -- although a numerical majority -- are nonetheless still a political, social and economic minority," Modiri said, "not unlike African Americans."

Police brutality also remains an issue in post-apartheid South Africa as well as in other African nations, including Kenya and Nigeria.

"This brutality is not structured racially but it is structured against the poor in society," Ibrahim told ABC News. "The African police systems never succeeded in making the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial police and retained a lot of the brutality and illegalities associated with colonial police."

Experts agreed that the only major distinction between the apartheid system and Jim Crow is the fact that Black people make up a majority of the population in South Africa, while they are the minority in the United States.

"Black South Africans and Americans are bound together in a long history of racial segregation, and it has not ended" Modiri said. "The struggle against white supremacy is a transnational one."

From Johannesburg to New York City

The year was 1963 and Bongani Sibeko's father, David Sibeko, was a rising member of the Pan Africanist Congress, a Black South African political movement that had broken away from the African National Congress. Both groups were working to end racial segregation and white majority rule in South Africa, and they had taken up arms in the wake of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when the national police force opened fire on a group of unarmed Black protesters, killing 69 of them.

As commander of the Pan Africanist Congress' paramilitary unit in the Vaal area, David Sibeko devised a plan to sabotage a train carrying South Africa's then-minister of justice, who had allegedly ordered the secret hangings of more than a dozen anti-apartheid activists. But he was captured on the night of the operation and held in detention for months.

David Sibeko was ultimately acquitted of the charges, and the Pan Africanist Congress leadership advised him to go into exile with his wife and children. Bongani Sibeko was 3 at the time.

The family was smuggled out of the country via a train from Johannesburg. When they eventually arrived at a refugee camp in Botswana, a bomb allegedly planted by South Africa's apartheid regime tore through the offices. So they had to stay on the move.

"They were after my father," Bongani Sibeko told ABC News.

From there, they traveled to Zambia and then Tanzania. They moved to London in 1968, when David Sibeko was appointed head of the Pan Africanist Congress' mission to Europe and the Americas. A few years later, he became the group's permanent observer at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, in association with the U.N. Special Committee Against Apartheid.

The family put down roots in a predominately Black neighborhood on the Upper West Side. Bongani Sibeko, who was 13 at the time, recalled knowing that he was South African but still feeling "amongst my own." Both his parents became involved with African American grassroots movements.

As a young Black man growing up in the United States, Bongani Sibeko said he had to quickly learn the rules of survival when dealing with law enforcement. He said his first brush with New York City police happened just after they had moved there, when his mother sent him out to buy groceries on Broadway.

"As I got onto Broadway, I saw a lot of people gathered around, police were everywhere," he recalled. "I saw this one cop and, you know, I basically asked him, 'Officer, what's going on?' He looked at me, spat at me and he said, 'F--- you n----! Get the hell out of here!'"

That encounter set the tone for the rest of his young adult life in New York City, he said, including one instance when he was beaten up in the street by seven white officers who he said had baited him into a confrontation.

"There's that moment that your life is at the cop's mercy, and if there's more than one you know that you're in serious trouble," he told ABC News. "One thing you have to understand is, your life is on the line."

How Africa reacted to George Floyd

Over the years, there have been several high-profile cases of police using deadly force against Black people that have energized America's debate on racism and inequality. The most recent was George Floyd.

Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old Black man, died in Minneapolis on May 25 after a white police officer was filmed kneeling on his neck as three other officers watched. His death has sparked anti-racism protests and calls for police reform across the United States and around the world, including in Africa. The continent voiced its anger in a statement released on May 29 through its regional bloc, the African Union, describing Floyd's death as an act of "murder."

The chair of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, condemned Floyd's killing and urged "authorities in the United States of America to intensify their efforts to ensure the total elimination of all forms of discrimination based on race or ethnic origin."

Then in June, Burkina Faso's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva penned a letter on behalf of 54 African nations, asking the U.N. Human Rights Council for an "urgent debate" on "racially inspired human rights violations, police brutality against people of African descent and the violence against the peaceful protests that call for these injustices to stop."

Although the letter called for a debate on racism around the world, Ambassador Dieudonne Desire Sougouri highlighted the situation in the United States, saying that Floyd's death "is unfortunately not an isolated incident, with many previous cases of unarmed persons of African descent suffering the same fate due to unchecked police brutality."

"The protests the world is witnessing are a rejection of the fundamental racial inequality and discrimination that characterize life in the United States for Black people, and other people of color," Sougouri wrote.

Experts said the widespread outrage over Floyd's death and the ensuing global support for the Black Lives Matter movement give reason for cautious hope, but substantial and meaningful change in the United States would be difficult. The same is true for post-apartheid South Africa.

"When a system becomes so deeply entrenched, it becomes harder and harder to uproot it," Modiri told ABC News. "The nature of the racial antagonism and racial conflict, and the trauma and the damage that racism has done in both the United States and in South Africa is fundamentally irreparable. It's unlikely that we can ever come out of it the same."

Still, Modiri added that "we should always be hopeful when communities of people refuse to accept the way things are."

Experts noted how the widening rift between liberals and conservatives in the United States has made legislative reform a challenge.

"I've seen many such demonstrations in the past and they never led to reform," Ibrahim told ABC News. "It's important for the Black Lives Matter movement to forge alliances with liberal Americans so they can sustain movement for a longer time, create more traction and, above all, ensure that the protests would be sustained up to the level where reforms are introduced."

Some 'look to Africa to find our roots'

When the coronavirus pandemic hit earlier this year and countries around the world began closing borders, Rashad McCrorey found himself at a crossroads.

The 40-year-old New York City native was in Ghana for a trip organized by his tourism company, Africa Cross Culture, which specializes in bringing Black Americans and the African diaspora to visit the continent. He could either return home immediately or stay in Ghana indefinitely. He chose the latter.

"I did some soul-searching," McCrorey told ABC News in a recent telephone interview. "I felt like I could run my business remotely and not only survive in Ghana but thrive out here."

Ghana, a former slave trading hub, has long advocated for Africans and those of African descent abroad to return to the continent. Many Black Americans, such as civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois, settled there in the 1960s. Last year, the West African nation launched the "Year of Return, Ghana 2019" on the 400th anniversary of slaves being brought to the United States with the goal of encouraging visits.

Reports estimate thousands of African Americans live in Ghana's capital of Accra, some looking to escape racism and other strife in the United States.

As civil unrest unfolds back home in America, McCrorey said he's confident he made the right decision to stay.

"It's the same merry-go-round," he said. "I saw the same thing in 2014."

In 2014, McCrorey was among thousands of protesters who took to the streets following the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed 43-year-old Black man who famously shouted "I can't breathe" as a white officer was filmed putting him in a chokehold while arresting him in the New York City borough of Staten Island. Black Lives Matter demonstrations soon spread across the country and the globe.

Although the officer involved in Garner's death is no longer patrolling the streets, McCrorey expressed frustration that there has been no real reform or structural change.

"Over time, things calm down, people go back to their regular lives until the next outrage happens," he told ABC News.

McCrorey visited Africa for the first time a few weeks after Garner's death. He fell in love with the country of Ghana and its people, and the trip inspired him to start his back-to-Africa travel company.

McCrorey described the experience of returning to the continent as an African American as healing and revitalizing, even if it's only for a visit. He said it's empowering to be surrounded by people who look like you in all aspects of society, from street vendors and shop owners to doctors, lawyers and politicians.

"We look to Africa to find our roots," he said. "We can look at Mother Africa as a rehab center to kind of get out of this systematic oppression."

'Without the world, we would have never been freed'

Bongani Sibeko had not yet turned 19 when his father was murdered.

David Sibeko had risen through the ranks of the Pan Africanist Congress, becoming a leading member of the group's central committee and being appointed director of foreign affairs. Meanwhile, he was doing important work for the U.N. Security Council and investigating South Africa's apartheid regime -- all of which put a target on his back.

On June 12, 1979, David Sibeko was assassinated during a meeting in Tanzania by sleeper agents of the apartheid regime who had infiltrated the Pan Africanist Congress, according to Bongani Sibeko. He was 39, leaving behind his wife and their four children.

Nearly 15 years after his father's death, Bongani Sibeko left New York City and moved back to South Africa when apartheid had ended. He has lived there ever since and said he is a proponent of Africans and the diaspora returning to the motherland.

"Our continent has been robbed of its people, and they should be welcomed back home," Bongani Sibeko told ABC News.

He expressed hope in the global momentum and support of America's Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of Floyd's death, recalling how the world in the same way backed the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

"This is a very emotional time for me because it reflects the global support that's happening for George Floyd and the plight of African Americans, it's very similar to the struggle we faced in that we did not struggle alone," he said. "Without the world, we would have never been freed."

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'Apartheid and Jim Crow are really no different': Why George Floyd's death reverberated in Africa

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Experts say there is little difference between apartheid and Jim Crow. LONDON -- Bongani Sibeko was just a toddler when he and his family were forced to flee their home in apartheid South Africa, as Black men, women and children were dying at the hands of authorities upholding the country's legal system of racial segregation.

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The United States has its best opportunity in 150 years to belatedly fulfill its promise as a multiracial democracy.

After George Floyd was killed, Donald Trump sensed an opportunity. Americans, anguished and angry over Floyd's death, had erupted in protest-some set fires, broke the windows of department stores, and stormed a police precinct. Commentators reached for historical analogies, circling in on 1968 and the twilight of the civil-rights era, when riots and rebellion engulfed one American city after another. Back then, Richard Nixon seized on a message of "law and order." He would restore normalcy by suppressing protest with the iron hand of the state. In return for his promise of pacification, Americans gave him the White House.

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Surveying the protests, Trump saw a path to victory in Nixon's footsteps: The uprisings of 2020 could rescue him from his catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. The president leaned into his own "law and order" message. He lashed out against "thugs" and "terrorists," warning that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." Ahead of what was to be his comeback rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, Trump tweeted, "Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis"-making no distinction between those protesting peacefully and those who might engage in violence.

In this, Trump was returning to a familiar playbook. He was relying on the chaos of the protests to produce the kind of racist backlash that he had ridden to the presidency in 2016. Trump had blamed the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri-a response to the shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer-on Barack Obama's indulgence of criminality. "With our weak leadership in Washington, you can expect Ferguson type riots and looting in other places," Trump predicted in 2014. As president, he saw such uprisings as deliverance.

Then something happened that Trump did not foresee. It didn't work.

Trump was elected president on a promise to restore an idealized past in which America's traditional aristocracy of race was unquestioned. But rather than restore that aristocracy, four years of catastrophe have-at least for the moment-discredited it. Instead of ushering in a golden age of prosperity and a return to the cultural conservatism of the 1950s, Trump's presidency has radicalized millions of white Americans who were previously inclined to dismiss systemic racism as a myth, the racial wealth gap as a product of Black cultural pathology, and discriminatory policing as a matter of a few bad apples.

Those staples of the American racial discourse became hard to sustain this year, as the country was enveloped by overlapping national crises. The pandemic exposed the president. The nation needed an experienced policy maker; instead it saw a professional hustler, playing to the cameras and claiming that the virus would disappear. As statistics emerged showing that Americans of color disproportionately filled the ranks of essential workers, the unemployed, and the dead, the White House and its allies in the conservative media downplayed the danger of the virus, urging Americans to return to work and resurrect the Trump economy, no matter the cost.

Meanwhile, the state's seeming indifference to an epidemic of racist killings continued unabated: On February 23, Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot after being pursued by three men in Georgia who thought he looked suspicious; for months, the men walked free. On March 13, Breonna Taylor, an emergency-room technician, was killed by Louisville, Kentucky, police officers serving a no-knock warrant to find a cache of drugs that did not exist; months later, one of the officers was fired but no charges were filed. Then, on Memorial Day, the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd's neck and ignored his many pleas for help. The nation erupted. According to some polls, more than 23 million people participated in anti-police-brutality protests, potentially making this the largest protest movement in American history.
In the past, the dream of remaking society has faltered when white Americans have realized what they would have to sacrifice to deliver freedom. The question now is whether this time is different.
American history has produced a few similar awakenings. In 1955, the images of a mutilated Emmett Till helped spark the civil-rights movement. In 2013, the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer inspired Alicia Garza to declare that Black lives matter, giving form to a movement dedicated to finishing the work begun by its predecessors. Just as today, the stories and images of shattered Black lives inspired Americans to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence more than just a fable of the founding. But almost as quickly, the dream of remaking society faltered, when white Americans realized what they would have to sacrifice to deliver freedom. The urgent question now is whether this time is different.
From the September 2020 issue: Daniel Q. Gillion on the myth of the silent majority
The conditions in America today do not much resemble those of 1968. In fact, the best analogue to the current moment is the first and most consequential such awakening-in 1868. The story of that awakening offers a guide, and a warning. In the 1860s, the rise of a racist demagogue to the presidency, the valor of Black soldiers and workers, and the stories of outrages against the emancipated in the South stunned white northerners into writing the equality of man into the Constitution. The triumphs and failures of this anti-racist coalition led America to the present moment. It is now up to their successors to fulfill the promises of democracy, to make a more perfect union, to complete the work of Reconstruction.

They came for George Ruby in the middle of the night, as many as 50 of them, their faces blackened to conceal their identities. As the Confederate veterans dragged Ruby from his home, they mocked him for having believed that he would be safe in Jackson, Louisiana: "S'pose you thought the United States government would protect you, did you?" They dragged him at least a mile, to a creek, where they beat him with a paddle and left him, half-dressed and bleeding, with a warning: Leave, and never return.

One of the few Black agents of the Freedmen's Bureau, the federal agency established to facilitate the transition of the emancipated from slavery to freedom in the South, Ruby had come to Jackson in 1866 to open a school for the newly liberated. Although some of the men who attacked Ruby were eventually tried, under the guard of Black Union soldiers, Ruby heeded his attackers' warning. But his choice of destination-Texas-would make him a frequent witness to the same violence he fled.

"Texas was very violent during the early years of Reconstruction," Merline Pitre, a historian and biographer of Ruby, told me. One observer at the time said that "there was so much violence in Texas that if he had to choose between hell and Texas, he would have chosen hell."

Ruby traveled through the state reviewing the work of the Freedmen's Bureau and sending dispatches to his superiors. As the historian Barry A. Crouch recounts in The Dance of Freedom, Ruby warned that the formerly enslaved were beset by the "fiendish lawlessness of the whites who murder and outrage the free people with the same indifference as displayed in the killing of snakes or other venomous reptiles," and that "terrorism engendered by the brutal and murderous acts of the inhabitants, mostly rebels," was preventing the freedmen from so much as building schools.

The post-Civil War years were a moment of great peril for the emancipated, but also great promise. A stubborn coterie of Republican Radicals-longtime abolitionists and their allies-were not content to have simply saved the Union. They wanted to transform it: to make a nation where "all men are created equal" did not just mean white men.

But the country was exhausted by the ravages of war. The last thing most white Americans wanted was to be dragged through a bitter conflict over expanding the boundaries of American citizenship. They wanted to rebuild the country and get back to business. John Wilkes Booth had been moved to assassinate Abraham Lincoln not by the Confederate collapse, but by the president's openness to extending the franchise to educated Black men and those who had fought for the Union, an affront Booth described as "nigger citizenship."

Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, viewed the Radical Republican project as an insult to the white men to whom the United States truly belonged. A Tennessee Democrat and self-styled champion of the white working class, the president believed that "Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people," and that allowing the formerly enslaved to vote would eventually lead to "such a tyranny as this continent has never yet witnessed." Encouraged by Johnson's words and actions, southern elites worked to reduce the emancipated to conditions that resembled slavery in all but name.

Throughout the South, when freedmen signed contracts with their former masters, those contracts were broken; if they tried to seek work elsewhere, they were hunted down; if they reported their concerns to local authorities, they were told that the testimony of Black people held no weight in court. When they tried to purchase land, they were denied; when they tried to borrow capital to establish businesses, they were rejected; when they demanded decent wages, they were met with violence.

In the midst of these terrors and denials, the emancipated organized as laborers, protesters, and voters, forming the Union Leagues and other Republican clubs that would become the basis of their political power. Southern whites insisted that the freedmen were unfit for the ballot, even as they witnessed their sophistication in protest and organization. In fact, what the former slave masters feared was not that Black people were incapable of self-government, but the world the emancipated might create.

From 1868 to 1871, Black people in the South faced a "wave of counter-revolutionary terror," the historian Eric Foner has written, one that "lacks a counterpart either in the American experience or in that of the other Western Hemisphere societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century." Texas courts, according to Foner, "indicted some 500 white men for the murder of blacks in 1865 and 1866, but not one was convicted." He cites one northern observer who commented, "Murder is considered one of their inalienable state rights."

The system that emerged across the South was so racist and authoritarian that one Freedmen's Bureau agent wrote that the emancipated "would be just as well off with no law at all or no Government." Indeed, the police were often at the forefront of the violence. In 1866, in New Orleans, police joined an attack on Republicans organizing to amend the state constitution; dozens of the mostly Black delegates were killed. General Philip Sheridan wrote in a letter to Ulysses S. Grant that the incident "was an absolute massacre by the police ... perpetrated without the shadow of a necessity." The same year, in Memphis, white police officers started a fight with several Black Union veterans, then used the conflict as a justification to begin firing at Black people-civilians and soldiers alike-all over the city. The killing went on for days.
Adam Serwer: Trump gave police permission to be brutal
These stories began to reach the North in bureaucratic dispatches like Ruby's, in newspaper accounts, and in testimony to the congressional committee on Reconstruction. Northerners heard about Lucy Grimes of Texas, whose former owner demanded that she beat her own son, then had Grimes beaten to death when she refused. Her killers went unpunished because the court would not hear "negro testimony." Northerners also heard about Madison Newby, a former Union scout from Virginia driven by "rebel people" from land he had purchased, who testified that former slave masters were "taking the colored people and tying them up by the thumbs if they do not agree to work for six dollars a month." And they heard about Glasgow William, a Union veteran in Kentucky who was lynched in front of his wife by the Ku Klux Klan for declaring his intent to vote for "his old commander." (Newspapers sympathetic to the white South dismissed such stories; one called the KKK the "phantom of diseased imaginations.")

The South's intransigence in defeat, and its campaign of terror against the emancipated, was so heinous that even those inclined toward moderation began to reconsider. Carl Schurz, a German immigrant and Union general, was dispatched by the Johnson administration to investigate conditions in the South. Schurz sympathized with white southerners who struggled to adjust to the new order. "It should not have surprised any fair-minded person that many Southern people should, for a time, have clung to the accustomed idea that the landowner must also own the black man tilling his land, and that any assertion of freedom of action on the part of that black man was insubordination equivalent to criminal revolt, and any dissent by the black man from the employer's opinion or taste, intolerable insolence," he wrote.

The horrors he witnessed, however, convinced him that the federal government had to intervene: "I saw in various hospitals negroes, women as well as men, whose ears had been cut off or whose bodies were slashed with knives or bruised with whips, or bludgeons, or punctured with shot wounds. Dead negroes were found in considerable number in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death, or strung upon the limbs of trees. In many districts the colored people were in a panic of fright, and the whites in a state of almost insane irritation against them."

When Schurz returned to Washington, Johnson refused to hear his findings. The president had already set his mind to maintaining the United States as a white man's government. He told Schurz that a report was unnecessary, then silently waited for Schurz to leave. "President Johnson evidently wished to suppress my testimony as to the condition of things in the South," Schurz wrote in his memoir. "I resolved not to let him do so."

The stories of southern violence radicalized the white North. "The impression made by these things upon the minds of the Northern people can easily be imagined," Schurz wrote. "This popular temper could not fail to exercise influence upon Congress and stimulate radical tendencies among its members."

Still convinced that most of the country was on his side, Johnson sank into paranoia, grandeur, and self-pity. In his "Swing Around the Circle" tour, Johnson gave angry speeches before raucous crowds, comparing himself to Lincoln, calling for some Radical Republicans to be hanged as traitors, and blaming the New Orleans riot on those who had called for Black suffrage in the first place, saying, "Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skirts and they are responsible." He blocked the measures that Congress took up to protect the rights of the emancipated, describing them as racist against white people. He told Black leaders that he was their "Moses," even as he denied their aspirations to full citizenship.

Johnson had reason to believe, in a country that had only just abolished slavery, that the Radicals' attempt to create a multiracial democracy would be rejected by the electorate. What he did not expect was that in his incompetence, coarseness, and vanity, he would end up discrediting his own racist crusade, and press the North into pursuing a program of racial justice that it had wanted to avoid.

Black leaders were conscious that Johnson's racism had, rather than weakening the cause of Black suffrage, reaffirmed its necessity. The Christian Recorder, edited by the Reverend James Lynch, editorialized that "paradoxical as it may seem, President Johnson's opposition to our political interests will finally result in securing them to us." The Republicans swept the 1866 midterms, and Johnson was impeached in 1868-officially for violating the Tenure of Office Act, but this was mere pretext. The real reason was his obstruction of Congress's efforts to protect the emancipated. Johnson was acquitted, but his presidency never recovered.

The turmoil in the South, and Johnson's enabling of it, set Congress on the path to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, ratified in 1868 and 1870, respectively. The amendments made everyone born or naturalized in the United States a citizen and made it unconstitutional to deprive Americans of the right to vote on the basis of race. Today, the principles underlying the Reconstruction amendments are largely taken for granted; few in the political mainstream openly oppose them, even as they might seek to undermine them. But these amendments are the foundation of true democracy in America, the north star for every American liberation movement that has followed.

Congress also passed laws barring racial discrimination in public accommodations, which would be quickly ignored and then, almost a century later, revived by the civil-rights movement. State governments, though not without their flaws and struggles, massively expanded public education for Black and white southerners, funded public services, and built infrastructure. On the ashes of the planter oligarchy, the freedmen and their allies sought to build a new kind of democracy, one worthy of the name.

The Reconstruction agenda was not motivated by pure idealism. The Republican Party understood that without Black votes, it was not viable in the South, and that its opposition would return to Congress stronger than it was before the war if Black disenfranchisement succeeded. Still, a combination of partisan self-interest and egalitarian idealism established the conditions for multiracial democracy in the United States.

Swept up in the infinite possibilities of the moment, even the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who before the war had excoriated America for the hollowness of its ideals, dared to imagine the nation as more than a white man's republic with Black men as honored guests. "I want a home here not only for the Negro, the mulatto, and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours," Douglass declared in 1869. "In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds, and to men of no creeds."

Black Americans today do not face the same wave of terror they did in the 1860s. Still, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery were only the most recent names Americans learned. There was Eric Garner, who was choked to death on a New York City sidewalk during an arrest as he rasped, "I can't breathe." There was Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, who was shot in the back while fleeing an officer. There was Laquan McDonald in Chicago, who was shot 16 times by an officer who kept firing even as McDonald lay motionless on the ground. There was Stephon Clark, who was gunned down while using a cellphone in his grandmother's backyard in Sacramento, California. There was Natasha McKenna, who died after being tased in a Virginia prison. There was Freddie Gray, who was seen being loaded into the back of a Baltimore police van in which his spinal cord was severed. There was Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old in Cleveland with a toy gun who was killed by police within moments of their arrival.

What these stories have in common is that they were all captured on video. Just as southern dispatches and congressional testimony about the outrages against the emancipated radicalized the white North with a recognition of how the horrors of racism shaped Black life in America, the proliferation of videos from cellphones and body cameras has provided a vivid picture of the casual and often fatal abuse of Black Americans by police.

"There's a large swath of white people who I think thought Black people were being hyperbolic about police humiliation and harassment," Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, told me. "We started seeing more and more people share videos of white people calling the cops on Black people and using the cops as their weapon against the Black community. Those kinds of viral videos-that weren't just about Black death, but Black people's everyday experience with policing-have shaped a new ideology. What are the police really here for? Who are they truly protecting?"

The continual accretion of gruesome evidence of police violence has taken a toll on today's activists; some rarely watch the videos anymore. George Floyd was killed just a few blocks from the home of Miski Noor, an organizer in Minneapolis. But Noor could watch the video of his death for only a minute before turning away.

"I've seen enough," Noor told me. "I don't want to see any more." But the work of Cullors, Noor, and others ensured that these videos dramatically shifted public opinion about racism and American policing.

After the rise of Barack Obama, large numbers of white Americans became convinced not only that racism was a thing of the past but also that, to the extent racial prejudice remained a factor in American life, white people were its primary victims. "In 2008, in the battleground states, more white voters thought reverse discrimination was a bigger deal than classic racial discrimination," Cornell Belcher, a pollster who worked on both of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns, told me. The activism of Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, and other groups, as well as the unceasing testimony of those lost to police violence, has reversed that trend. "In the past, white voters by and large didn't think that discrimination was a real big thing. Now they understand that it is."

A June 2020 Monmouth University poll found increases across all races in the belief that law enforcement discriminates against Black people in the U.S. The same poll found that 76 percent of Americans considered racism and discrimination a "big problem"-up from 51 percent in 2015. In a Pew Research Center poll the same month, fully 67 percent of Americans expressed some degree of support for Black Lives Matter.

These numbers are even more remarkable when considered in historical context. In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mass demonstrations were more likely to harm than to help the movement for racial equality. In 1965, after marchers in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by state troopers, less than half of Americans said they supported the marchers.
"I think this country is at a turning point," Alicia Garza says. "People are grappling with the fact that we're not actually in a post-racial society."
The shift that's occurred this time around "wasn't by happenstance," Brittany Packnett Cunningham, an activist and a writer, told me, nor is it only the product of video evidence. "It has been the work of generations of Black activists, Black thinkers, and Black scholars that has gotten us here"-people like Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michelle Alexander, and others. "Six years ago, people were not using the phrase systemic racism beyond activist circles and academic circles. And now we are in a place where it is readily on people's lips, where folks from CEOs to grandmothers up the street are talking about it, reading about it, researching on it, listening to conversations about it."

All of that preparation met the moment: George Floyd's killing, the pandemic's unmistakable toll on Black Americans, and Trump's callous and cynical response to both.

Still, like Andrew Johnson, Trump bet his political fortunes on his assumption that the majority of white Americans shared his fears and beliefs about Black Americans. Like Johnson, Trump did not anticipate how his own behavior, and the behavior he enabled and encouraged, would discredit the cause he backed. He did not anticipate that the activists might succeed in convincing so many white Americans to see the protests as righteous and justified, that so many white Americans would understand police violence as an extension of his own cruelty, that the pandemic would open their eyes to deep-seated racial inequities.

"I think this country is at a turning point and has been for a little while. We went from celebrating the election of the first Black president in history to bemoaning a white nationalist in the White House," Alicia Garza told me. "People are grappling with the fact that we're not actually in a post-racial society."

How far will the possibilities of this moment extend? We could consider two potential outcomes-one focused on police and prisons, and a broader one, aimed at eliminating the deeply entrenched systems that keep Black people from realizing full equality, a long-standing crisis Americans have tried to suppress with policing and prisons rather than attempting to resolve it.

A majority of Americans have accepted the diagnosis of Black Lives Matter activists, even if they have yet to embrace their more radical remedies, such as defunding the police. For the moment, the surge in public support for Black Lives Matter appears to be an expression of approval for the movement's most basic demand: that the police stop killing Black people. This request is so reasonable that only those committed to white supremacy regard it as outrageous. Large majorities of Americans support reforms such as requiring the use of body cameras, banning choke holds, mandating a national police-misconduct database, and curtailing qualified immunity, which shields officers from liability for violating people's constitutional rights.

The urgency of addressing this crisis has been underscored by the ongoing behavior of police departments, whose officers have reacted much as the white South did after Appomattox: by brutalizing the people demanding change.

In New York City, officers drove two SUVs into a crowd of protesters. In Philadelphia, cops beat demonstrators with batons. In Louisville, police shot pepper balls at reporters. In Austin, Texas, police left a protester with a fractured skull and brain damage after firing beanbag rounds unprovoked. In Buffalo, New York, an elderly protester was shoved to the ground by police in full riot gear, sustained brain damage, and had to be hospitalized. The entire riot team resigned from the unit in protest-not because of their colleagues' behavior, but because they faced sanction for it.

Yet the more the police sought to violently repress the protesters, the more people spilled into the streets in defiance, risking a solitary death in a hospital bed in order to assert their right to exist, to not have their lives stolen by armed agents of the state. "As the uprising went on, we saw the police really responding in ways that were retaliatory and vicious," Noor told me. "Kind of like, 'How dare you question me and my intentions and my power?' "

At the height of Reconstruction, racist horrors produced the political will to embrace measures once considered impossibly idealistic, such as Black male suffrage. Many Black Lives Matter activists have a similarly radical vision. The calls to defund or abolish the police seem sudden to those who do not share their premises. But these activists see a line of continuity in American policing that stretches back to the New Orleans and Memphis killings that so outraged the postbellum white North, and back further still, to antebellum slave patrols. And although there is no firm consensus on how to put an end to this history, there is broad agreement that police should not be the solution to problems like poverty, addiction, and homelessness, and that public resources should be used to meet the needs of communities.

In the face of implacable violence across generations, simply banning choke holds and mandating body cameras are not meaningful solutions. To these activists, centuries of liberal attempts at reform have only bureaucratized the role of the police as the armed guardians of a racist system, one that fractures Black families, restricts Black people's employment opportunities, and excludes them from the ballot box.

"I want to see the existing systems of policing and carceral punishment abolished and replaced with things that actually restore justice and keep people safe at home," Packnett Cunningham told me.

The problem is not simply that a chance encounter with police can lead to injury or death-but that once marked by the criminal-justice system, Black people can be legally disenfranchised, denied public benefits, and discriminated against in employment, housing, and jury service. "People who have been convicted of felonies almost never truly reenter the society they inhabited prior to their conviction. Instead, they enter a separate society, a world hidden from public view, governed by a set of oppressive and discriminatory rules and laws that do not apply to everyone else," Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow in 2010. "Because this new system is not explicitly based on race, it is easier to defend on seemingly neutral grounds."

In the aftermath of the Ferguson protests, it was fashionable to speak of a "new civil-rights movement." But it is perhaps more illuminating to see Black Lives Matter as a new banner raised on the same field of battle, stained by the blood of generations who came before. The fighters are new, but the conflict is the same one that Frederick Douglass and George Ruby fought, one that goes far beyond policing.

As Garza put it to me, American society has turned to law enforcement to address the challenges Black communities face, but those challenges can't be solved with a badge and a gun. "You don't have schools that function well; you don't have teachers that get paid; you don't have hospitals in some communities," she said. "You don't have grocery stores in some communities. This creates the kinds of conditions that make people feel like police are necessary, but the solution is to actually reinvest in those things that give people a way to live a good life, where you have food, a roof over your head, where you can learn a craft or skill or just learn, period."

Believing in racial equality in the abstract and supporting policies that would make it a reality are two different things. Most white Americans have long professed the former, and pointedly declined to do the latter. This paradox has shown up so many times in American history that social scientists have a name for it: the principle-implementation gap. This gap is what ultimately doomed the Reconstruction project.

One of the ways the principle-implementation gap manifests itself is in the distinction between civic equality and economic justice. After the Civil War, Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican, urged the federal government to seize the estates of wealthy former Confederates and use them in part to provide freedmen with some small compensation for centuries of forced labor. Stevens warned that without economic empowerment, freedmen would eventually find themselves at the mercy of their former masters.

"It is impossible that any practical equality of rights can exist where a few thousand men monopolize the whole landed property," Stevens wrote in 1865. "The whole fabric of Southern society must be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it never has been, a true republic."

Even in his own party, Stevens's idea was viewed as extreme. Nineteenth-century Republicans believed in an ideology of "free labor," in which the interests of labor and capital were the same, and all workers could elevate themselves into a life of plenty through diligence and entrepreneurship. By arming Black men with the ballot, most Republicans believed they had set the stage for a free-labor society. They did not see what the emancipated saw: a world of state-sanctioned and informal coercion in which simply elevating oneself through hard work was impossible.

As the freedmen sought to secure their rights through state intervention-nondiscrimination laws in business and education, government jobs, and federal protection of voting rights-many Republicans recoiled. As the historian Heather Cox Richardson has written, these white Republicans began to see freedmen not as ideal free-laborers but as a corrupt labor interest, committed to securing through government largesse what they could not earn through hard work. "When the majority of the Southern African-Americans could not overcome the overwhelming obstacles in their path to economic security," she wrote in The Death of Reconstruction, "Northerners saw their failure as a rejection of free-labor ideals, accused them of being deficient workers, and willingly read them out of American society."

Retreating from Reconstruction, these Republicans cast their objections to the project as advocacy for honest, limited government, rather than racism. But the results would ultimately be the same: an abandonment of the freedmen to their fate. Men like Carl Schurz, who had been briefly radicalized by the violence in the South and the extremism of Andrew Johnson, began to see federal intervention on behalf of the freedmen as its own kind of tyranny.

"Schurz advocated political amnesty, an end to federal intervention, and a return to 'local self-government' by men of 'property and enterprise,' " Eric Foner writes. "Schurz sincerely believed blacks' rights would be more secure under such governments than under the Reconstruction regimes. But whether he quite appreciated it or not, his program had no other meaning than a return to white supremacy."

Local authority was ultimately restored by force of arms, as Democrats and their paramilitary allies overthrew the Reconstruction governments through intimidation, murder, and terrorism, and used their restored power to disenfranchise the emancipated for almost a century. Many of the devices the southern states used to do so-poll taxes, literacy tests-disenfranchised poor whites as well. (It was not the first or last time that the white elite would see the white poor as acceptable collateral damage in the fight for white supremacy.) At the national level, the economic collapse brought on by the Panic of 1873 wounded Republicans at the ballot box and further weakened support for the faltering Reconstruction project.

White northerners deserted the cause as if they had never supported it. They understood that they were abandoning the emancipated to despotism, but most no longer considered the inalienable rights of Black Americans their problem.

"For a brief period-for the seven mystic years that stretched between Johnson's 'Swing Around the Circle' to the Panic of 1873, the majority of thinking Americans of the North believed in the equal manhood of Negroes," W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1935. "While after long years the American world recovered in most matters, it has never yet quite understood why it could ever have thought that black men were altogether human." These Americans believed Black lives mattered. But only for a moment.

Thaddeus Stevens knew that without sufficient economic power, civic equality becomes difficult to maintain. His insight has proved remarkably durable across American history. The question now is whether a new coalition, radicalized by racism, can defy that history.

The most dramatic advances for Black Americans since Stevens's time have come in the form of civic equality, not economic justice. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the party of Lincoln's hold on northern Black voters with promises of a New Deal. But FDR's reliance on southerners in Congress-the guardians of American apartheid-ensured that most Black Americans were discriminated against by the policies that built the prosperous white middle class of the mid-20th century: the Social Security Act, the National Housing Act, the GI Bill, and others.

When President John F. Kennedy introduced, in June 1963, what would become the Civil Rights Act, he saw it as fulfilling the work of Reconstruction. "One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression," Kennedy declared. "And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free."

JFK's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, sought to enact his vision with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act, in what is sometimes referred to as the Second Reconstruction. But just as the first Reconstruction had been obliterated by Jim Crow, the Great Society's ambitions toward civic equality and economic justice were drowned by its crime-prevention programs. As the historian Elizabeth Hinton writes in From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, those programs metastasized into a bipartisan policy of mass incarceration. Future administrations from both parties divested from the Great Society's social programs, while pouring funding into law enforcement. This, Hinton observes, left "law enforcement agencies, criminal justice institutions, and jails as the primary public programs in many low-income communities across the United States."

Americans remember the occasion of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech as the March on Washington, but this is a shorthand: The 1963 event was actually called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King and others in the civil-rights movement did not see the goals of civic equality and economic justice as severable. Yet they, too, struggled to persuade white Americans to devote the necessary public resources to resolving the yawning economic disparities between Black people and white people.

"White America, caught between the Negro upsurge and its own conscience, evolved a limited policy toward Negro freedom. It could not live with the intolerable brutality and bruising humiliation imposed upon the Negro by the society it cherished as democratic," King wrote in The Nation in 1966. "A hardening of opposition to the satisfaction of Negro needs must be anticipated as the movement presses against financial privilege."

King was right. The racial wealth gap remains as wide today as it was in 1968, when the Fair Housing Act was passed. The median net worth of the American family is about $100,000. But the median net worth of white families is more than $170,000-while that of Black families is less than $20,000. According to William Darity Jr., an economist and Duke public-policy professor, fully a quarter of white families have a net worth of more than $1 million, while only 4 percent of Black families meet that threshold. These disparities in wealth persist among middle- and low-income families. In 2016, according to Pew, "lower-income white households had a net worth of $22,900, compared with only $5,000 for Black households and $7,900 for Hispanic households in this income tier." These disparities are not the product of hard work or cultural differences, as one conservative line of thinking would have it. They are the product of public policy, what Darity calls the "cumulative damages" of racial discrimination across generations.

What economic strides Black Americans had made in the decades since 1968-largely through homeownership, the traditional cornerstone of wealth-building in the United States-were all but wiped out by the Great Recession of 2008. From 2005 to 2009, according to the Pew Research Center, the median net worth of Black households dropped by 53 percent, while white household net worth dropped by 16 percent.

Just as the Great Recession devastated the personal wealth of Black Americans, the coronavirus recession now threatens to destroy Black businesses, which are especially vulnerable to economic downturns, as they tend to lack corporate structures, easy access to credit, and large cash reserves. They are also less likely to be able to access government aid, because they may not have a preexisting relationship with the big banks that distribute the loans and because of outright discrimination. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition conducted an experiment in which white and Black subjects requested information about loans to help keep their small businesses open during the pandemic. It found that white requesters received favorable treatment-were offered more loan products, and were more likely to be encouraged to apply for them-compared with Black requesters.

From February to April, according to Robert Fairlie, an economist at UC Santa Cruz, 41 percent of Black businesses stopped operations, compared with 22 percent of businesses overall. This loss will have a cascading effect, devastating not only the business owners themselves but the people who live in the cities and neighborhoods where they are located. "Black-owned businesses tend to hire a disproportionate number of Black employees," Fairlie told me.

In the aftermath of the coronavirus, the nation will have to be reconstructed. It will require a massive federal effort to keep Americans in their homes, provide them with employment, revive businesses that have not been able to function under pandemic conditions, protect workers' health and safety, sustain cash-strapped state governments, and ultimately restore American prosperity. It will take an even greater effort to do so in a manner that does not simply reproduce existing inequities. But the necessity of post-pandemic rebuilding also provides an opportunity for a truly sweeping New Reconstruction, one that could endeavor to resolve the unfinished work of the nation's past Reconstructions.
There has never been an anti-racist majority in American history. There may be one today.
The obstacles facing such an effort are manifold. Too many Americans still view racism as largely a personal failing rather than a systemic force. In this view, one's soul can be purged of racism by wielding the correct jargon, denouncing the right villains, and posting heartfelt Instagram captions. Fulfilling the potential of the current moment will require white Americans to do more than just seek or advertise their personal salvation.

Then there is the question of whether the political vehicle of today's anti-racist coalition, the Democratic Party, is up to the task, should it prevail in the 2020 elections. Reversing the erosion of voting rights is an area of obvious partisan self-interest for Democrats, and one likely to command broad support. The fight against racist policing and mass incarceration is largely a state and local one. Activists have yet to persuade a majority of voters to embrace their most radical proposals, but they have already achieved a great deal of success in stiffening the spines of politicians in their dealings with police unions, in electing progressive district attorneys over the objections of those unions and their allies, and in prompting officials to transfer certain law-enforcement responsibilities to other public servants. The greater challenge will be enacting the kind of sweeping reforms that would unwind what King called entrenched financial privilege.

"Efforts to remedy glaring racial inequality in the criminal-justice system, which whites have long denied but now acknowledge, tap into principles of equal treatment that have historically been easier to get whites on board for than the big structural changes that are needed to produce some semblance of actual equality," the political scientist Michael Tesler told me recently. "Whites have historically had little appetite for implementing the policies needed to achieve equality of outcomes."

As for the Democrats' presidential standard-bearer, Joe Biden has struck an ambitious note, invoking the legacy of Reconstructions past. "The history of this nation teaches us that in some of our darkest moments of despair, we've made some of our greatest progress," Biden declared amid the Floyd protests in June. "The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendments followed the Civil War. The greatest economic growth in world history grew out of the Great Depression. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of '65 came on the tracks of Bull Connor's vicious dogs ... But it's going to take more than talk. We had talk before; we had protest before. We've got to now vow to make this at least an era of action and reverse the systemic racism with long-overdue concrete changes."

Such a call to action would be more promising if Biden himself were not an author of the system he now opposes. He became a U.S. senator in an era of racial backlash. He worked with segregationists to dismantle school-desegregation programs and was part of the bipartisan bloc that expanded mass incarceration. During the "tough on crime" era of the 1990s, he bragged on the Senate floor of the fondness for prisons and harsh punishment in the "liberal wing of the Democratic Party." Biden's selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate is historic, but Harris, a former prosecutor, is no radical on these matters.

Yet change is possible, even for an old hand like Biden. Ulysses S. Grant married into a slave-owning family, and inherited an enslaved person from his father-in-law. Little in his past suggested that he would crush the slave empire of the Confederacy, smash the first Ku Klux Klan, and become the first American president to champion the full citizenship of Black men. Before he signed the Civil and Voting Rights Acts as president, Senator Lyndon Johnson was a reliable segregationist. History has seen more dramatic reversals than Joe Biden becoming a committed foe of systemic racism, though not many.

If Democrats seize the moment, it will be because the determination of a new generation of activists, and the uniqueness of the party's current makeup, has compelled them to do so. In the 1870s-and up through the 1960s-the American population was close to 90 percent white. Today it is 76 percent white. The growing diversity of the United States-and the Republican Party's embrace of white identity politics in response-has created a large constituency in the Democratic Party with a direct stake in the achievement of racial equality.

There has never been an anti-racist majority in American history; there may be one today in the racially and socioeconomically diverse coalition of voters radicalized by the abrupt transition from the hope of the Obama era to the cruelty of the Trump age. All political coalitions are eventually torn apart by their contradictions, but America has never seen a coalition quite like this.

History teaches that awakenings such as this one are rare. If a new president, and a new Congress, do not act before the American people's demand for justice gives way to complacency or is eclipsed by backlash, the next opportunity will be long in coming. But in these moments, great strides toward the unfulfilled promises of the founding are possible. It would be unexpected if a demagogue wielding the power of the presidency in the name of white man's government inspired Americans to recommit to defending the inalienable rights of their countrymen. But it would not be the first time.
This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline "The Next Reconstruction." * Lead image: Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin; photographs by Alex Lau; Earl Gibson III; Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times; Getty; Joe Raedle; Library of Congress; niAID; Zaid Patel

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The United States has its best opportunity in 150 years to belatedly fulfill its promise as a multiracial democracy. After George Floyd was killed, Donald Trump sensed an opportunity. Americans, anguished and angry over Floyd's death, had erupted in protest-some set fires, broke the windows of department stores, and stormed a police precinct.

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America Had a Reckoning on Race This Year. The Election Showed How Little Has Changed

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Despite a summer of racial injustice protests and a restless reckoning around race in America, the election revealed a stark divide on the fight for equity.

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a texas teacher was fired for wearing a black lives matter face mask - cnn

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A Texas teacher was fired for wearing a Black Lives Matter face mask

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A Texas teacher was fired for continuing to wear a Black Lives Matter face mask after school officials asked her to stop.

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Is America’s Future South Africa’s Past?

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There are uncomfortable parallels between the United States in 2020 and South Africa in the dying days of white rule.

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South Africa is still under apartheid | AJ+

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Life under Apartheid | Teaching with Primary Sources | PBS LearningMedia

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This inquiry kit has Library of Congress sources about the history of apartheid and South Africa's racial segregation policies.

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For white South Africans the 1960s was a decade of boom and unprecedented prosperity. For black South Africa, the 1960s saw apartheid harden into its most dogmatic and racist form.

Ernest Cole, born Kole, was probably the finest documentary photographer of his generation. His outstanding photographic record of what it was like to be black in Verwoerd's white republic forms the heart of this exhibit. These photographs, which Cole took into exile in the late 1960s, were published in his book House of Bondage, which was banned in apartheid South Africa. When the museum opened its doors in 2001, it was the first time Cole's photographs were publicly displayed in South Africa.

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For white South Africans the 1960s was a decade of boom and unprecedented prosperity. For black South Africa, the 1960s saw apartheid harden into its most dogmatic and racist form. Ernest Cole, born Kole, was probably the finest documentary photographer of his generation.

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How Nelson Mandela fought apartheid-and why his work is not complete

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Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in what was then known as the Union of South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire. Though the majority of its inhabitants were Black, they were dominated by a white minority that controlled the land, the wealth, and the government-a discriminatory social structure that would later be codified in the country's legal system and called apartheid.

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Comedian Trevor Noah On being mixed race in South Africa

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From 1948 through the 1990s, a single word dominated life in South Africa. Apartheid -Afrikaans for "apartness"-kept the country's majority Black population under the thumb of a small white minority. It would take decades of struggle to stop the policy, which affected every facet of life in a country locked in centuries-old patterns of discrimination and racism.

What Was Apartheid?

The segregation began in 1948 after the National Party came to power. The nationalist political party instituted policies of white supremacy, which empowered white South Africans who descended from both Dutch and British settlers in South Africa while further disenfranchising Black Africans.

The system was rooted in the country's history of colonization and slavery. White settlers had historically viewed Black South Africans as a natural resource to be used to turn the country from a rural society to an industrialized one. Starting in the 17th century, Dutch settlers relied on slaves to build up South Africa. Around the time that slavery was abolished in the country in 1863, gold and diamonds were discovered in South Africa.

That discovery represented a lucrative opportunity for white-owned mining companies that employed-and exploited-Black workers. Those companies all but enslaved Black miners while enjoying massive wealth from the diamonds and gold they mined. Like Dutch slaveholders, they relied on intimidation and discrimination to rule over their Black workers.

Apartheid Laws and Segregation

The mining companies borrowed a tactic that earlier slaveholders and British settlers had used to control Black workers: pass laws. As early as the 18th century, these laws had required members of the Black majority, and other people of color, to carry identification papers at all times and restricted their movement in certain areas. They were also used to control Black settlement, forcing Black people to reside in places where their labor would benefit white settlers.

Those laws persisted through the 20th century as South Africa became a self-governing dominion of the United Kingdom. Between 1899 and 1902, Britain and the Dutch-descended Afrikaners fought one another in the Boer War, a conflict that the Afrikaners eventually lost. Anti-British sentiment continued to foment among white South Africans, and Afrikaner nationalists developed an identity rooted in white supremacy. When they took control in 1948, they made the country's already discriminatory laws even more draconian.

Racist fears and attitudes about "natives" colored white society. Though apartheid was supposedly designed to allow different races to develop on their own, it forced Black South Africans into poverty and hopelessness. "Grand" apartheid laws focused on keeping Black people in their own designated "homelands." And "petty" apartheid laws focused on daily life and restricted almost every facet of Black life in South Africa.

Pass laws and apartheid policies prohibited Black people from entering urban areas without immediately finding a job. It was illegal for a Black person not to carry a passbook. Black people could not marry white people. They could not set up businesses in white areas. Everywhere from hospitals to beaches was segregated. Education was restricted. And throughout the 1950s, the NP passed law after law regulating the movement and lives of Black people.

Though they were disempowered, Black South Africans protested their treatment within apartheid. In the 1950s, the African National Congress, the country's oldest Black political party, initiated a mass mobilization against the racist laws, called the Defiance Campaign. Black workers boycotted white businesses, went on strike, and staged non-violent protests.

These acts of defiance were met with police and state brutality. Protesters were beaten and tried en masse in unfair legal proceedings. But though the campaigns took a toll on Black protesters, they didn't generate enough international pressure on the South African government to inspire reforms.

Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela and the Black Consciousness Movement

In 1960, South African police killed 69 peaceful protesters in Sharpeville, sparking nationwide dissent and a wave of strikes. A subgroup of protesters who were tired of what they saw as ineffective nonviolent protests began to embrace armed resistance instead. Among them was Nelson Mandela, who helped organize a paramilitary subgroup of the ANC in 1960. He was arrested for treason in 1961 and was sentenced to life in prison for charges of sabotage in 1964.

In response to the 1960 protests, the government declared a state of emergency. This tactic cleared the way for even more apartheid laws to be put in place. Despite the state of emergency, Black groups continued to organize and protest. But a crackdown on many movement leaders forced them into exile abroad.

Anti-apartheid protests continued as life for Black South Africans became more and more dire under apartheid. On June 16, 1976, up to 10,000 Black schoolchildren, inspired by new tenets of Black consciousness, marched to protest a new law that forced them to learn Afrikaans in schools. Steve Biko, anti-apartheid activist and co-founder of the South African Students' Organization, spearheaded the movement and was arrested multiple times for his activism before dying from injuries sustained while in police custody on September 12, 1977.

When Did Apartheid End?

During the 1980s, resistance became even more fierce. Peaceful and violent protests finally began to spark international attention. Nelson Mandela, the movement's most powerful and well-known representative, had been imprisoned since 1964. But he inspired his followers to continue resisting and conducted secret negotiations to end apartheid.

By the end of the 1980s, discontentment was growing among white South Africans about what they saw as South Africa's diminished international standing. By then, the country faced sanctions and economic ramifications as international businesses, celebrities, and other governments pressured the government to end discrimination. As the economy faltered, the government was locked in a stalemate with anti-apartheid activists.

But when South African president P.W. Botha resigned in 1989, the stalemate finally broke. Botha's successor, F.W. de Klerk, decided it was time to negotiate to end apartheid in earnest.

In February 1990, de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and other opposition groups and released Mandela, whose secret negotiations had thus far failed, from prison. Despite continued political violence, Mandela, de Klerk and their allies began intensive negotiations.

In 1994, the NP was finally defeated and Mandela became president of South Africa. A constitutional assembly was convened and South Africa adopted a new constitution that allowed for a South Africa that was not ruled by racial discrimination. It took effect in 1997.

By then, South Africa had dismantled apartheid for good. Mandela and de Klerk won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for their cooperation, and a truth and reconciliation commission began investigating human rights abuses and memorializing those abuses. The transition was not entirely non-violent. But by its end, South Africa had forged a new reality: one that owed its existence to the continued resistance of an oppressed racial majority.

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The Harsh Reality of Life Under Apartheid in South Africa | HISTORY

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For decades, the country's Black majority was controlled by racist laws enshrining white supremacy.

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How Nelson Mandela Fought for Equality and Freedom

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Trevor Celebrates Nelson Mandela’s 100th Birthday | The Daily Show