Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

At the onset of the Post-Reconstruction era in 1877, the infamous Jim Crow laws took hold when rights granted by Reconstruction were swiftly taken away. The eleven Confederate states plus two sympathizer states that formed the core of the Jim Crow region were: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. We’ve all heard of the stark inequities in access at one time in these states, from segregated bathrooms to no-admittance hospitals to isolated burial plots. Despite the fact that black Americans now held nominal citizenship after the Thirteenth Amendment, the courts refused to enforce the privileges of belonging for them, deferring instead to the right of states to inculcate their racist dogmas into the laws that governed the most basic actions.