Reconstruction. Jim Crow. Civil Rights. Now. Every Generation Did the Work.

I teach African American history.

So when people ask me whether this moment — the DEI rollbacks, the attacks on affirmative action, the efforts to restrict what can be taught about Black history — is unprecedented, my answer is always the same.

No. It is not unprecedented. It is a pattern.

That is not a comforting answer. But it is a clarifying one. Because once you recognize the pattern, you can also recognize what has always come next.

Reconstruction

From 1865 to 1877, something remarkable happened in this country.

Formerly enslaved people voted. Held office. Built schools. Established businesses. Participated in civic life in ways that fundamentally challenged the racial order that had existed before the war. Black men served in the United States Congress. Black communities built institutions that served their people with dignity and real excellence.

Then came the retrenchment.

The Compromise of 1877 ended federal enforcement of Reconstruction. Violence escalated. Black voters were pushed out through poll taxes, literacy tests, and terror. Jim Crow laws locked segregation into every dimension of public life.

Everything that had been built was systematically taken apart.

But here is what the history actually shows. What came out of those years was not erasure. It was HBCUs. It was the Black church as a civic institution. It was mutual aid societies, fraternal organizations, and professional networks that kept Black communities alive through conditions designed to destroy them.

They dismantled what we built. So we built something they could not reach.

Jim Crow

Jim Crow lasted nearly a century. It was enforced by law, by violence, and by the economic and social structures of American life. It was designed to be total.

It was not total.

In the spaces where Black Americans were shut out of white institutions, we built our own. Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Sweet Auburn in Atlanta. Black hospitals, law firms, newspapers, banks, and schools. These were not second-rate substitutes. In many cases they were superior — because they were built by people for whom excellence was not optional. Excellence was survival.

The Civil Rights Movement did not come from nowhere. It came from that infrastructure. It was organized through Black churches that had been building capacity for generations. It was led by people trained at HBCUs. It was sustained by networks and institutions that existed long before the cameras showed up.

You cannot separate the movement from the ground it grew out of.

Now

I want to be honest with you about what I am not doing here.

I am not romanticizing the past. The end of Reconstruction was violent. Jim Crow's human cost was devastating. The Civil Rights generation paid prices we should never minimize or turn into inspiration content.

What I am doing is telling you what the pattern shows.

Conditions designed to stop our people have never — in four hundred years of American history — actually stopped us. They have redirected us. Cost us. Slowed us. Taken from us in ways that were profoundly unjust.

But they have not stopped us.

So the question right now is not whether conditions are hard. They are. The question is what we build in response.

Every generation has faced a version of this moment. Every generation has asked the same question — what do we do now?

Every generation found the answer not by waiting for institutions to become just. But by building something that did not require institutional justice to function.

That is what we are doing. And I want every family, every church, every community organization, and every educator reading this to know — there is a place for you in that work.

The work has always been ours to do.

It still is.

Help has arrived.