when Black men won the right to vote. Voting rights of Black people have been under attack ever since. A recent example is the 2018 election of Brian Kemp, who narrowly defeated Stacey Abrams for the Georgia governorship. As Georgia’s secretary of state, during the campaign, Kemp closed more than 200 polling places, suspended 53,000 voter registrations, and purged thousands of Black and Brown Georgians from the voter rolls. But far from being an anomaly, this type of voter suppression is commonplace throughout the United States.
“After Obama’s victory, 395 new voting restrictions were introduced in 49 states from 2011 to 2015,” wrote Ari Berman in Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. “The sudden escalation of efforts to curb voting rights most closely resembled the Redemption period that ended Reconstruction, when every Southern state adopted devices like literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African American voters.”
It is unfortunate that in all the coverage given to voter suppression, there has been little attention devoted to the struggles that led to the 15th Amendment in the first place. Reconstruction, the era immediately following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, is full of lessons for students, teachers, and activists.
Reconstruction was the first era of Black Power. Black people across the South took the lead in defining the meaning of freedom. Blacks and poor whites began to chip away at the racist ideology that had justified slavery for nearly two centuries, by taking the reins of state governments across the South from the old slave-owning elite. Together, they wrote new state constitutions and attempted to use their new political power to benefit the poor and working classes. Reconstruction governments abolished imprisonment for debt and property qualifications for holding elected offices, outlawed discrimination by hotels and railroads, and took actions to protect agricultural workers and sharecroppers. A key achievement of these governments was the establishment of free public education throughout most of the South (though most of these schools were segregated).
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