For the fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress, and the nation, seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could birth the multiracial democracy that Black Americans envisioned, even if our founding fathers had not. But it would not last. “Tyranny is a central theme of American history,” the historian David Brion Davis writes in his 2006 book, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, and “racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.”
