The optimistic title of Booker T. Washington’s classic memoir, Up from Slavery (1901), remained a fond hope a full century after slavery ended, and once the opportunity to redistribute the estates of the planter class was missed during First Reconstruction, the prospects for economic reparations disappeared forever. It was one thing to acknowledge the rights to vote and to sit together on a bus, quite another to share resources; and lacking that radical commitment, the legal and political rights bestowed during Second Reconstruction rested atop an apparently permanent black underclass whose
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