How does the Reconstruction-era civil rights debate connect to the 20th century civil rights movement?
Ted Tunnell: The second Reconstruction is what historians call the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the time in which finally black people are truly emancipated. They’re only half emancipated after the Civil War. Final emancipation, final meaning to the promise of the first Reconstruction, doesn’t come until the 1950s and the 1960s, in the second Reconstruction. But without the first one, you don’t have the second. …In some sense, the first Reconstruction is ahead of its time. The public accommodations clauses, the civil rights laws, this notion of a bi-racial citizenship, that black people are going to be full partners in the story of American life. The promise is there in the first Reconstruction, but it is aborted. And it doesn’t fully come to fruition until the second Reconstruction.
