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

by Stacey Abrams

During Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, as well as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, began the painful reassertion of our nation’s core principles of equal protection under the law. The little-known Civil Rights Act of 1866 followed the end of slavery, and it transformed the lives of Blacks in America. For the first time, federal law guaranteed legal rights, allowed for labor rights, and permitted access to education and freedom of religion. Black churches, often maintained in secret, flourished. Historically Black colleges and universities educated teachers, doctors, and businessmen, and other Black students gained acceptance to historically white institutions. Economic opportunity opened up for hundreds of thousands grappling with the terrible transition from slavery into the putative free market economy. But the act had its fiercest opponent in Democrat Andrew Johnson, serving his turn as president in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination. Johnson vetoed the act, but a Republican Congress overrode his veto. In 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States, which overturned the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott. Black men and women finally held a status they had been historically denied—but Native Americans did not benefit from this change. No persons considered visitors to the United States, or Native Americans living on reservations, as mos...