What parallels do you see between the events that took place on January 6 and the Reconstruction era? Eric Foner Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, touches on the bleak fortitude of white supremacy, the correlation between impeached presidents Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump, and how the results of the Georgia Senate runoffs should give America some hope. The clash between them has gone on for a long time and apparently will continue,” Foner told me. Those are both parts of the American way. “What you saw was the clash of two kinds of traditions in this country: The white nationalist tradition and the tradition of interracial democracy. To put this in context, I talked to one of the world’s foremost experts on Reconstruction, historian Eric Foner, emeritus professor of history at Columbia University, about why America must continue to look back at the Capitol riot on January 6, and to the lessons of the Reconstruction era, to understand how these events speak to a long and ongoing racial friction and hostility. The push and pull between Black advancement and white supremacy then mirrors the forces at play today.

But since a sector of white America opposed this - vestiges of the Confederacy attempting to stay alive - white mobs took it upon themselves to push back against progress by killing the people who tried to move forward. It attempted to rebuild the South’s economy and empower Black people by abolishing slavery, granting them the right to vote, promising equal protections, expanding education and civil rights, and instituting biracial governments, where Black political leaders sat alongside white ones. Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, from 1863 to 1877, tried to redress the inequities of slavery by giving rights to Black people through the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.

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