The lesson of Reconstruction is us. That we exist and breathe and love and sing and laugh and are still here is not a miracle or a revelation. It is a simple, unignorable fact that we cannot be extinguished. All the evil that the world has ever had to offer has been lobbed in our direction. They enslaved. They brainwashed. They lynched us separately and massacred us by the hundreds. They enslaved us by the boatload and sold our families in pieces. They mined our muscles and our minds for their profit and built an empire from it. And when we did the same without their help, they set it on fire.
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