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

by Stacey Abrams

After the Civil War, from 1865 to 1877, the United States made a brief, aborted attempt at meeting the basic premise of democracy by enforcing, for the first time, the rights of Black Americans. This period was known as Reconstruction. The opening salvo came in the form of the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, a critical prerequisite for expanded Black participation in the decisions of their communities. However, even the abolition of slavery carried a wicked reprisal, allowing for involuntary servitude as punishment for the commission of a crime, a feature exploited eagerly by not only former Confederates but their Northern and Western white compatriots in power. With newly freed slaves mostly living in the South (there were more than four million enslaved at the time of the Civil War), the fight to prevent full citizenship was waged for more than a decade. The Black Codes, formalized by Southern states in the 1860s, had counterparts in Northern states, some dating back to the colonial era. In the South, a newly freed Black man had no right to vote. In the lawless towns that existed after the war, Blacks could not own weapons to defend themselves, even though organized law enforcement might not exist. Even the act of walking down a city street carried peril. Vagrancy laws made it illegal for Blacks to move about without proof of a job. A Black man waiting on a street corner to meet his wife could be arrested and jai...