From the winner of 2019 Pulitzer Prize: Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight As the election neared in 1876, all knew the last vestiges of Reconstruction policies and regimes were at stake in the remaining "unredeemed" Southern states. In 1876 the project of Reconstruction, and perhaps the United States itself, were like a huge battleship slowly turning around as it lost power; once turning, it could hardly be stopped, even if the same group of officers remained at the helm. That year the Supreme Court weakened the Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments by emasculating the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and revealing deficiencies in the Fifteenth Amendment. In US v. Cruikshank, based on prosecutions for the horrible Colfax massacre of 1873, the Court overruled the conviction of Louisiana whites who had attacked a political meeting of blacks and conspired to deprive them of their rights. The justices ruled that the Fourteenth
From the winner of 2019 Pulitzer Prize: Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight Douglass found himself in a position, a decade and a half after emancipation, not unlike many leaders of the modern civil rights movement. They have to fight to protect political and constitutional triumphs, as well as a new national historical memory, while they also face a deepening crisis of structural repression and inequality. Douglass's story, when he was heroically right as well as disappointingly wrong, was a rehearsal for the long haul of postemancipation and post-civil rights black and progressive leadership who have encountered foes as virulent as the Democratic Party's Southern Redeemers of the 1870s and much of the Republican Party in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.