The Third Reconstruction: Carrying on New Orleans’ Civil Rights legacy
24th October 2022 · 0 Comments
We are experiencing America’s Third Reconstruction. Since its birth in 1776, leadership in America has torn the nation apart three times, followed by a reconstruction (rebuilding) period.
The first Reconstruction Era occurred after the American Civil War, also called the War Between the States. The reasons for the four-year War (1861–65) between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America is a matter of debate. Confederate sympathizers argue that the War was about economic autonomy.
However, lofty language aside, Southern states left the Union because white government officials refused to end slavery, stop buying and selling kidnapped human beings of African descent, and force them to work for free under a brutal system of imprisonment and under the penalty of death.
Efforts to break up the “United” States’ democratic republic continued after the Civil War. White officials, primarily in the South, refused, generation after generation, to accept Black people and other people of color (first nation people had already been forced off of their land between 1830-1850) as equal members of this grand experiment called Democracy.
The lawsuit of Homer Plessy in New Orleans (1896) challenged segregated railways. The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a “separate but equal doctrine,” in Plessy v Ferguson, ushering in more than a half-century of legal apartheid. Then-Associate Justice Edward Douglas White Jr., from Louisiana, voted to codify segregation. Edward Douglas White Sr., his father, was a plantation owner and Louisiana’s ninth governor. White Jr. became Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1910 and served until he died in 1921.
White was a self-admitted KKK member who served in the Confederacy and took part in the Battle of Liberty Place in 1874, an armed white supremacist uprising that briefly took control of New Orleans from the Reconstruction-era government. A bronze statue of White created in 1926 was removed from the front of the Louisiana State Supreme Court building in 2020 and placed inside near the LSC Museum.
The Second Reconstruction occurred after Brown v. Board of Education ended legal apartheid in 1954. Again, there was a bloody struggle for equality and fairness. Whites lynched, beat, and killed Blacks, burned down communities, and hurled nasty threats at innocent little girls in New Orleans who were the first to segregate the public schools.
College students and protesters at sit-ins and freedom riders were spat upon and beaten in the early 1960s for exercising their civil and voting rights. President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Law of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped to quell the unrest in Black communities. But the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 angered Black communities across the nation, prompting cries of burn baby burn as American cities went up in flames.
And now the country needs a Third Reconstruction. Why? For the same reasons, the U.S. experienced previous Reconstruction Eras. White people refuse to accept Black people and any non-white ethnic group as equals.
Throughout the U.S.’s existence, whites have bent laws to disenfranchise Blacks and people of color. Even before the election of America’s first Black President, Barack H. Obama, whites people in high places, including state and federal government officials, judges, and attorneys, have conspired to nullify the votes of Black people.
They’ve gerrymandered districts, refused to give the vote to ex-felons, and made restrictive voting laws. The U.S. Supreme Court started dismantling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in 2013 and continues attacking the VRA today. White Republicans in Congress refuse to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And former President Donald J. Trump Sr., a white supremacist, paved the way for white supremacist militias to try to violently overthrow our Democracy. In contrast, he attempted to use state officials and the courts to defeat a free and fair election.
As usual, it is up to Black people and a cadre of sane white people to reconstruct the U.S. government.
We know the task facing us: To rebuild a more perfect union and save democracy. Our people have had to do this for our community during other reconstruction eras.
After the First Reconstruction period, Black New Orleanians fought for civil rights and voting rights; P.B.S. Pinchback, Oscar Dunn, Homer Plessy, the Committee of Citizens, and many others fought for equality. They were lawyers, community activists, newspaper publishers, and social justice groups like the NAACP in the fight to uphold newly minted Civil Rights amendments added to the U.S. Constitution.
During the Second Reconstruction, which began after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Attorneys A.P. Tureaud, Ernest N. Morial, Nils Douglas, and Lolis Eli fought in the courts for equality. Meanwhile, young civil rights activists like Oretha Castle Haley, Rudy Lombard, Dodie Simmons, Jerome Smith, Dave Dennis, and Don Hubbard did sit-ins, and some were freedom riders. Llewellyn Soniat, Andy Washington, Ruby Bridges, Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, Tessie Prevost, and others fought to desegregate the city and state for nearly a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court decision.
During the modern Civil Rights Movement, many equal justice advocates joined the elders in the ongoing fight for civil rights, social justice, voting rights, housing rights, and economic equality. The late Dyan French Cole, Ron Chisom, Tyronne Edwards, Carl Galmon, Malcolm Suber, Michael “Quess” Moore, Angela Kinlaw, Debra Campbell, Walter Goodwin, Ronald Koleman, the Rev. Willie Calhoun, Tracy Washington, Alanah Odoms, Meanwhile, during each reconstruction period, black-owned newspapers continued to stand against injustice and keep the community informed about the fight for equality and true justice.
In 2022, we must fight for voting and civil rights and our old nemeses, racial hatred and white domestic terrorism, white supremacy, and attacks on Democracy fueled by everyday whites and white people in high places.
White supremacists – inventing the replacement theory, fostering hate, banning books by Black authors, and hunting and killing Blacks – is a continuum of White superiority exacerbated by the election of President Obama, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the recent appointment of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Blacks are facing the same hate-fueled violence their ancestors confronted. Even worse, the insane “replacement theory,” by white supremacists is fueling much of the violence we are witnessing. The killing of 10 Black people in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket is a glaring example of the racial hatred that has spread across the U.S.
But in the freedom-fighting tradition of their ancestors, New Orleans’ natives are in the vanguard of the fight for justice and equality and civil and voting rights, as well as fighting against violent hate crimes, racism, and white supremacy.
New Orleans-born Attorneys Damon Hewitt and Marc H. Morial were at the White House on August 28, 2022, on the 59th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Hewitt is the President and Executive Director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Morial, a former New Orleans mayor, is the National Urban League president and CEO.
The lawyers joined the National Action Network (NAN), National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, NAACP, Legal Defense Fund, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) at the White House to urge President Biden to take decisive action to protect voting rights and close the economic gap.
“This fundamental American right is undoubtedly under its greatest threat since the Jim Crow era, which sparked the first historic 1963 march. At the White House, these leaders laid out how Americans face the same issues as they did decades ago and urged the President to take swift action in the coming year,” Hewitt’s organization stated.
Morial said: “The anti-democracy wave that began to rise after record-high Black voting rates in 2008 and crested with the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder to gut the Voting Rights Act has now broken against ‘The Big Lie.’ Radical state and federal lawmakers, openly coordinating with violent extremists on a campaign of suppression and intimidation, are dangerously close to dismantling American Democracy and establishing the autocratic rule.
…. The fierce backlash against racial justice and equal opportunity is born of fear and ignorance, and only a clear-eyed reckoning of reality can overcome it.”
Hewitt said: “In 2020 we hoped that we were experiencing a long overdue mass racial reckoning in this country. However, for the past two years, we have found ourselves in a sharp, deeply harmful reversal of this momentum. Our Democracy is threatened by draconian state laws, conspiracy theories, economic insecurity, racism, and hate.
We need to pass meaningful, expansive voting rights legislation for Black Americans and other communities of color facing unprecedented voter suppression and election subversion threats. We must resist the effort to bypass accountability concerns and blindly invest in law enforcement in the same communities that have experienced police brutality, taking us back to the ‘tough-on-crime policies of a generation ago that inevitably led to the over-incarceration of Black and Brown communities.
We must create pathways to economic prosperity in communities of color, both urban and rural. We must advance a whole-of-society approach to addressing white supremacist violence–always demanding justice and going beyond law enforcement responses to the nation’s number one domestic threat. And we must ensure that the civil rights protections we’ve fought for apply in every public and private life sphere, including online, where so many of us live our lives nowadays.”
The leaders were also present at the White House’s United We Stand Summit on September 15, 2022.
The United We Stand Summit was held on the 59th Anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by white supremacists that killed four little girls and injured others.
In May, the National Action Network (NAN), Anti-Defamation League (ADL), National Urban League (NUL), Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) urged President Biden to convene such a summit against hate-fueled attacks.
At the time, Morial’s National Urban League issued a statement about the call to action: “The murderous attack in Buffalo yesterday, resulting in 10 dead, three injured, and countless families and communities changed forever, is the latest in a long line of attacks that can be referred to simply by city names: Oak Creek, Charleston, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Poway, El Paso. We know the problem: hatred and conspiracy theories spread unchecked online, hate crimes and bias incidents increase in frequency and impact, perpetrators of violence are perversely heralded as heroes, self-appointed “saviors” with easy access to weapons target a community that they believe does not belong here. Even as we mourn this most recent tragedy, we know that it is long past time for a whole of society response.”
Hewitt released a statement on the day of the United We Stand Summit”: “Today, the White House hosted the “United We Stand” Summit, bringing together civil rights advocates, hate incident survivors, and business and government leaders to address the rising tide of hate nationwide. We applaud President Biden for hosting the United We Stand Summit, a promising step in the fight against white supremacy.
In recent years we have witnessed a troubling rise in violence and threats of intimidation against Black Americans and other communities of color. People have been attacked or threatened while voting, shopping and even worshiping. The United We Stand Summit offers an opportunity to address this scourge. The administration and all those participating must take the opportunity to make this convening more than a single moment; it must mark the beginnings of a ‘Marshall Plan’ to fight hate-motivated violence and the proliferation of white supremacist ideology. All hands must be on deck.”
Watch the Summit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybPe2czIY7o
We owe a debt of gratitude to Hewitt and Morial and all of our civil rights, voting rights, and social justice advocates. They’re keeping it real, speaking truth to power, and taking action.
They are doing their part to seek justice, equality, and fairness for us. We must do the same. We must call out injustice, wrongdoing, white supremacy, and criminal acts wherever they occur.
The least we Blacks can do is to vote in every election: local, state, and federal.
This article originally published in the October 24, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
