Reconstruction's Warning: What 1874 Teaches Us About This Midterm

In 1862, Robert Smalls was enslaved. Thirteen years later, he was a member of the United States Congress. Reconstruction was the closest America had ever come to a democracy for all of its people. Black men voted, wrote new state constitutions, and won office by the hundreds, building public schools that served Black and white children alike. Then, in 1874, a midterm election, a bad economy, a tired public, and organized terror at the polls began to bring it all down. On this episode of Ret...