I mentioned in the introduction that we have previously reached in our history two critical moments of moral reckoning where we faced the daunting challenge of beginning again; both times we failed. The first was during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the second was the black freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century. These moments are connected insofar as the black freedom struggle, what scholars call the Second Reconstruction, sought, among other things, to complete what was left of what the historian Eric Foner describes as the unfinished revolution.
