Black life is not lived in hyperreality.

As 2020 unfolded, I found daily inspiration in a new generation of leaders who seized America’s attention—often young Black women who practiced a synthesis of educational, journalistic, policy, legal, and artistic social justice activism, and who were as interested in scaling radical knowledge production for masses of Black and multiracial people as they were in mastering conventional electoral politics. The journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’s intellectual leadership in creating the 1619 Project—a multimedia exploration of racial slavery and its legacies, initially published by The New York Times Magazine in August 2019 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize in May 2020—inspired a national debate on the uses and abuses of history in crafting American conceptions of race, identity, citizenship, and democracy. It also helped to expansively reimagine what leadership in service to Black dignity and citizenship looked like.

Black history is not immune from historical blinders of patriarchy; nor from an overreliance on documenting the activities of famous, wealthy, and credentialed figures; nor from a reticence to see the world through the eyes of those residing in America’s lower frequencies. Stories of prisoners and poor people, of Black LGBTQIA+ communities, and of the disabled and neurodivergent rarely figure into our heroic models of civil rights leadership. Turning once again to history as a political guide, cultural weathervane, and emotional resource, I dug deeper into the past. I became particularly interested in how parts of the Black community unable to run for elected office, raised in challenging circumstances, and faced with the brutality of racial terror had become leaders in earlier periods. Most intriguing during the nineteenth century were the Black women, many of them born during the era of racial slavery to parents living in bondage, who assumed a mantle of transformational leadership by sharing parts of our national history— including America’s long practice of gender-based sexual violence, exploitation, and incarceration—that many others preferred to be left unspoken.

I heard echoes of the pioneering journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, for example, in the dynamic Black women organizers who turned the Movement for Black Lives into a global phenomenon. Like her, they were deeply invested in narrating the full spectrum of Black life, both to one another and for the world. In her heroic fieldwork as an investigative journalist, Wells had documented horrific scenes of lynching, seeking to personalize victims who were doubly massacred: first by the brutality of racial violence, and second in bitterly unfeeling narratives by white journalists that justified their tragic ends by depicting them as violent rapists. After local whites burned her office and threatened her life, Wells fled north and continued her work. She was primarily based in Chicago, where she married Ferdinand L. Barnett, an attorney, in 1895 (thereafter becoming Ida B. Wells- Barnett). But she also traveled widely and had an international impact. There is poetic symmetry in the fact that it was a young Black woman, Darnella Frazier, who filmed George Floyd’s death for the world to see.

Frazier was part of a vast and rising Black Lives Matter generation who captured the world’s imagination in 2020. After Floyd’s death I watched in awe as brave Black women leaders—such as Tamika Mallory, an organizer of the 2017 Women’s March—spoke unvarnished truth to power with a furious eloquence recognizing the fierce urgency of now. Black people had been “in a state of emergency” even before Floyd’s death, Mallory declared at a press conference a few days after his May 25, 2020, public lynching in Minneapolis. Language about prison abolition and defunding the police once commonly heard only in grassroots, Black-led social justice organizations suddenly became part of the realest and rawest national conversation about Black dignity and citizenship in American history. I watched in pride as a new generation carried on the Black freedom struggle. They did so not by seeking new answers to old questions, but by asking new questions, in the process transforming the entire framework for discussions of Black history, freedom, and democracy. This new generation—Black women; Queer, feminist, cis, and trans people; activist students and scholars; prisoners and the formerly incarcerated; writers, poets, singers, artists, and mothers—was redefining the parameters of leadership within our community, at the national level, and around the world.

These leaders did not simply resurrect your grandmother’s civil rights movement. Instead, they updated the radical journalism of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells and blended it with the prophetic teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, with the sacred witness of Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, and with the abolition democracy of Angela Davis, creating a revolutionary new synthesis that matched the scale of the crisis facing the nation. A year of pandemic, protest, and prophetic witness of Black America’s sacrificial dignity in the face of unmitigated suffering produced new models of service-oriented leaders who at once reflected the best within the Black radical tradition and broke generative new ground. BLM activists deployed social media as an organizing tool, effectively publicizing the breadth and depth of the structural violence and systemic racism damaging Black communities. They mobilized large swaths of the nation during the protests of the spring and summer, simultaneously strategizing around policy solutions that profoundly changed the national conversation about criminal punishment reform.

The George Floyd protests created a justice effect that reverberated through major American institutions and at the core of the nation’s unfolding racial and political reckoning. Demands for the eradication of racism and its supply chains of inequality, poverty, segregation, misery, and death became a focal point of national and even global attention. Racism’s uncanny impact on every facet of American life became the subject of national protests, controversy, and soul searching. Prompted by this new generation of leaders, Americans wrestled with the complicity of a wide range of institutions, political actors, and ordinary citizens in reinforcing the denigration of Black humanity in small and large ways: from National Football League players being punished for taking the knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality; to the Confederate flags and monuments that still formed a built landscape memorializing white supremacy; to the failure of corporate America to leverage economic power in support of racial justice.

Something magical unfolded during 2020. Making all Black lives matter in theory and in practice seemed possible, even achievable, in our lifetime. And Black women’s stories became, if only for a moment, universal, taking on resonance on a scale unimaginable just a year earlier. Narratives centering Black women’s experiences, their joys as well as their traumas, became part of the national discourse. Suddenly, Americans proclaimed the names of martyrs killed by unjustified police violence, such as Breonna Taylor. They reckoned with evidence indicating that young Black girls are punished, policed, and marginalized in public schools. In 2020, parts of the American past usually disregarded and abandoned collapsed in on a nation that had long been unaware of the extent of the problem and unprepared to do the hard work required to build and sustain multiracial democracy. Fortunately for America, Black women were prepared to do that work— the work of building the “Beloved Community”—through the same models of grassroots collective leadership that Black women like my mother had embraced for generations, and that now appeared as a guiding light to a country plunged into the shadows of racial discord. Even as one version of the story America had told itself for centuries was shattered, Black women introduced another, more powerful narrative that could possibly suture our wounded souls.4

Journalists, pundits, and even historians frequently compared the unfolding racial crisis of 2020 to 1968 and the aftermath of the King assassination. But starting the search for historical analogies a century earlier is more fruitful, because the First Reconstruction is the American origin story that refuses to go away.5 Even as generations of Black activism in support of citizenship and dignity came together in new ways in the face of new threats in 2020, one could see striking parallels between the present day and both the First and Second Reconstructions. Just as in the years after the Civil War, for example, 2020 changed the aesthetics of Black leadership from the ground up. As Black women crafted new stories of Black dignity and citizenship, they helped to expansively redefine what leadership means and how it looks. The Black women leaders in the age of Black Lives Matter told America a transformational story about itself. If Malcolm X rightly characterized the nation as a prison for Black people, Black women organizers, strategists, activists, and thought leaders offered tools of both decarceration and liberation. The most exhilarating aspect of Black women’s leadership, for me, proved to be its radical racial optimism in the face of withering assaults against our collective humanity. These leaders found hope in sharing stories of resilience in the face of violence, of speaking truth to power while resisting shame, of searching for physical and spiritual wellness and healing in the fertile political gardens of generations past.

The women of Black Lives Matter imagined a world where their stories were considered universal: where they were American stories. They told us about the thousands of school suspensions on the road to juvenile facilities, the hazards of domestic and partner violence, the sexual trafficking of Black girls, the violence against trans women, and the unspoken police brutality that had led to the #SayHerName campaign. Meanwhile, Black women’s emergence as the most reliable Democratic Party voters told another story, one too often narrated only from above, about the power, ambition, and strength of grassroots Black women’s civic and political vision. The storytellers mattered just as much as the story they told.6

The COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice uprisings in 2020 America recalled biblical depictions of God’s wrath taking the form of pestilence, famine, and despair. The Book of Exodus—featuring the most famous of these depictions—resonates powerfully within Black religious, political, and cultural traditions. The story of the Israelites fleeing slavery’s bondage in Egypt for the land of Canaan, promised to them by God through the prophet Moses, fueled the freedom dreams of enslaved Black people. During the First Reconstruction, in the wake of racial terror, violence, and cruelty, Blacks migrated west to presumably more forgiving territories and states. Black nationalists, pan-Africanists, and a range of other Black political actors debated the ideas about nation-building, migration, and escape to a new land that Exodus evoked.

Later, in the Great Migrations that began after World War I and lasted into the late 1960s, millions of Black folk moved from the South into the North and West, injecting southern Black culture into the political veins of the entire nation. These demographic changes paved the way for a national American cultural milieu forever indebted to the genius of Black folk. The civil rights and Black Power eras sought to turn the idea of Exodus inside out, pursuing a future where America itself was reimagined as a welcoming space for Black communities, a new “promised land” of Black citizenship and dignity.

Black activists also renewed a historical interest in an African continent undergoing rapid decolonization, traveling to African nations and collaborating with their leaders and citizens. In the Black Power era, Du Boisian “double consciousness” became synthesized within a holistic Black identity. The African diaspora provided inspiration and ballast for reimagining the Black past, present, and future. Malcolm X became one of the avatars of this Black Nationalist vision of Exodus when he spent time in Africa during his last year; his quest was to pick up the continent’s revolutionary fire and return it, like Prometheus, to the domestic arena of civil rights struggles. And Martin Luther King Jr.’s prophetic role in the civil rights movement made him a modern-day analogue to Moses as well, a spiritual and moral leader who, as he suggested in his final speech, had “seen the promised land,” even though he might not reach it.7

The idea of Exodus again came to the fore in 2020 against the backdrop of a national racial justice movement that drew perhaps more than twenty-five million people into the streets.8 Exodus is a story of flight and a reckoning with evil. Both occurred in America during 2020. The flight took place metaphorically, in the form of America’s potential departure—its deliverance at last—from its history of comfort with the death of Black people, whether from brutality or hardship, and its arrival to the borders of a new era where it could start the process of becoming a new nation: the one that our ancestors dreamed of, hoped for, and fervently struggled to attain. This reckoning played out in violent struggles over whose narratives would shape the public interpretation of America’s past and present, over institutional resources, and over political power, even as the nation seemed to begin that process of transformation before our very eyes.

As protesters gathered the day after George Floyd’s murder, first in Minneapolis and then in dozens of other cities, something changed. Demonstrations organized and inspired not by charismatic male leaders but instead by Queer, feminist, and radical Black women inspired a large, multiracial, and multigenerational movement that sought not to escape the nation but instead to remake it from root to stem. More than ever before, large numbers of whites were taking to the streets, too, perhaps inspired by a combination of outrage over Floyd’s death, political awareness raised by Black Lives Matter protests since 2013, and exhilaration over the easing of shelter-in-place orders brought on by the pandemic. In their number and their size, the demonstrations soon surpassed the high tide of the civil rights movement’s heroic period. And police violence against demonstrators was just as extensive.9

A winter of discontent featuring a deadly pandemic, mass unemployment, and Black suffering became a revolutionary moment of biblical reckoning that witnessed the largest multiracial demonstrations promoting Black dignity in history. Many observers compared the protests—and the violence—to 1968, when 125 American cities burned in mourning, grief, and anger in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

To be sure, there were certain parallels. King’s death marked a tipping point in American racial politics, as did Floyd’s. But 1968 also marked the denouement of America’s Second Reconstruction. Shortly before King’s murder, the Kerner Commission Report, published in March 1968, provided a sober analysis of the roots of that era’s racial and political unrest, and particularly the 1967 uprisings in Newark and Detroit. Commissioned by President Johnson, the report diagnosed America’s urban crisis as being rooted in structures of white supremacy, institutional racism, violence, and economic injustice, which together formed a feedback loop of unrelenting tragedy. The Kerner Commission became a best-seller and an unheeded warning; it offered the nation a path forward to the multiracial democracy that had been delayed since Reconstruction, but its prescient distillation of the structural violence targeting Black communities was destined to become an artifact of history—though one ready to be taken up by a new generation during the Third Reconstruction.10

There were good reasons that the fires this time prompted comparisons to 1968. But at the time of his assassination and the uprisings in its wake, King was a Nobel Prize–winning social justice movement leader, the American Apostle of nonviolence, and the most famous and celebrated Black leader of the era. George Floyd was not, and it is precisely this anonymity that made the uprisings in his memory unique. Compared to King’s assassination, Floyd’s death moved larger numbers of white Americans to acknowledge systemic racism and the existence of white supremacy. The role of Black women and their allies at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement in shaping public consciousness and policy debates over the preceding seven years had been behind this. They had done the work beforehand, helping to influence the way in which Floyd’s death was understood and perceived, and especially how it was part of a larger tapestry of structural violence and historical racism against Black bodies.11

By June 2020, demonstrations in support of Black dignity had spread to more than two thousand cities, including dozens where the populations were more than 95 percent white. Thousands gathered in predominantly white states such as Utah and Oregon. Hundreds of thousands of protesters swelled into millions who marched across bridges, flooded downtown city centers, and swarmed rural hamlets and small towns calling for an end to structural racism, violence, police brutality, and white supremacy. “Black Lives Matter” signs were accompanied by messages to defund the police, eliminate white privilege, and end racial injustice and economic inequality through radical policy proposals that the Movement for Black Lives had developed and promoted over the previous seven years. Black equality as the beating heart of American democracy proved to be the central message behind the largest social justice mobilization in American history.12

The vision that animated this mobilization was a deeply reconstructionist one. That is, it sought to reimagine America as a multiracial democracy through the kind of bold policy advocacy rooted in Reconstruction-era Black politics. In 2020, this reconstructionist vision included calling out the Lost Cause—the redemptionist view of America that has thrived, even during moments of racial progress and the two previous eras of Reconstruction—as a phenomenon that needed to be acknowledged, confronted, and then eradicated. This new era of protest recognized the Trump presidency and the MAGA movement as symptoms of a larger national illness, a disorder deeply embedded in a history of racial injustice that touches every facet of American life and its scarred institutions, policies, and politics in ways that both transcended ideology and amplified partisan political divides. And for several months, support of Black Lives Matter as a group, concept, and movement grew nationally—even as the forces of redemption began to muster a counterassault.13

All the while, BLM marked a changing of the guard within Black leadership. America’s election of Barack Obama could be seen as the pinnacle of a vision of Black politics that viewed citizenship as something defined by middle-class, upwardly mobile, elite strivers.14

The killing of George Floyd telescoped 150 years of American history into just over nine minutes of grueling footage. Thousands of grassroots activists and hundreds of nonprofits, community organizers, and young strategists were prepared for the moment. Many of them had come of age within a dizzying political milieu, one featuring a Black president but where police killings of unarmed Black people were increasing in visibility. Groups like the Movement for Black Lives—a coalition of political, legal, and grassroots organizations seeking to make transformational changes in the criminal justice system, and armed with detailed, transformative policy initiatives—entered the national debate over police brutality and mass incarceration in new and impactful ways. Just as important, they stood ready with a radical new reconstructionist outlook.

The face of Black politics in 2020 moved forward while looking back. It was as if the radical spirit of Ida B. Wells had laid hands on the entire nation, moving the plight of Black bodies from the margins of American political life to its very center. Reconstruction’s aspirational legacy of multiracial democracy suddenly gripped large parts of America’s democratic imagination, culminating in November in Joe Biden’s presidential election in perhaps the most racially charged campaign in American history. And as the year wore on, Black women saved democracy through storytelling that simultaneously critiqued and created. They pointed to long-forgotten wounds as well as newly festering ones, and they exalted fugitive democratic spaces and places, in the process recasting models of Black leadership.

Ida B. Wells’s legacy cannot be overstated. A native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, she was born into slavery in 1862 and lived through the triumphs and tragedies of Reconstruction-era America. Her parents, Elizabeth and James Wells, a cook and a carpenter, were born into bondage in Virginia and Mississippi, respectively. They died of yellow fever when Ida was just sixteen. Holly Springs became a site of Civil War battles and later had a Freedmen’s Bureau headquarters, and Wells’s experiences there shaped her future advocacy of abolition democracy.

Wells had grown up surrounded by images of Black dignity. She had watched men and women march in support of the Republican Party– backed Loyal League, declarations of Black political power and citizenship in the face of white paternalism and the Ku Klux Klan’s murderous rage. From Holly Springs, she witnessed a world undergoing a profound, even miraculous transformation. White supporters of Black equality rose to the governorship of Mississippi, and forty Black men were elected to the state’s Reconstruction legislature. By 1873, Black men had served as the state’s superintendent of education, Speaker of the House, and secretary of state. Two Black men from the state, Hiram Revels and later Blanche K. Bruce, became US senators.15 Wells attended the first “colored” school in Holly Springs, and her father supported Reconstruction policies.

After her parents’ death, to take care of her six brothers and sisters, Wells abandoned her studies at Rust University to become a teacher. Two years later, in 1880, she moved with her two younger sisters to Memphis to live with her Aunt Fanny. There she discovered her vocational identity as a crusading journalist for racial justice and abolition democracy in support of Black dignity and citizenship. In 1883, she objected to an effort to remove her from the Ladies’ Car to the “Colored Section” of a train in Mississippi. She sued the railroad and won, her $500 award in damages making newspaper headlines, including some that she wrote herself. The 1892 lynching of three Black men in Memphis inspired Wells to launch what would come to be known as her “anti-lynching” campaign. This was in fact America’s first organized movement for criminal justice reform in the face of systemic anti-Black racism and violence.16

In her anti-lynching campaign, Wells pioneered new forms of policy activism, investigative journalism, and social science research. She visited the sites of lynchings, made these scenes of unspeakable racial violence the focus of fact-finding missions, and shared the results with her increasing numbers of Black readers. Long before the founding of the NAACP and Black Lives Matter, Wells cataloged the brutality of her time for readers in such newspapers as Free Speech. “Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of Free Speech,” began one forensic accounting of racial terror. Her reportage spanned a wide geographical area, from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Anniston, Alabama, and from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Clarksville, Georgia. Wells insisted that the rape allegations commonly used to justify lynchings of Black men hid a far less sinister truth about consensual interracial sex, a fact that would “be very damaging to the moral reputation” of white women if widely understood. Wells fled Memphis in fear of white retaliation in 1892 as a result of the ire such words stirred up. She became one of her generation’s most vocal Black leaders, helping to organize opposition to white supremacy over the next thirty years.17

In New York City, writing for the New York Age, Wells penned an editorial titled “The Truth About Lynching” on June 25, 1892, that distilled the predicament in which Black people found themselves. The “lynch laws,” she said, showed that the well-crafted image of the “best men” in the country was a sham; their allegiance was to white supremacy and their lives rested on a foundation of greed, cowardice, and an unwillingness to recognize the shared humanity of Blacks and whites. Wells’s editorial exposed the fundamental lie behind redemptionist logic: the reality of this shared humanity could be seen in the mixed-race children—products of rape and sexual assault and of consensual relationships—who populated the entire southern landscape. White men lusted after Black women, Wells asserted, their well-known “preference for Afro-American women” adding a further layer of hypocrisy to grotesque and unjustified assaults against the Black family in American policy and culture.

Myths of Black rape, Wells said, were bound up in efforts to organize racial terror, support white political domination, and prolong the abuse of Black lives. Lynching created a feedback loop in which preconceived notions of Black criminality justified widespread racial violence, which was designed not to protect white womanhood, but to maintain white political domination. That domination was threatened by dreams of a new South governed as a multiracial democracy, where even Black women like Wells herself could lead. The editorial laid down a moral gauntlet powerful enough to shake the nation to its foundations. Beyond its initial ten-thousand-copy print run in the New York Age, it would be published as a fifteen-cent pamphlet, Southern Horrors, using money raised from a New York City benefit organized in Wells’s honor. The benefit event attracted hundreds of Black women and led to the establishment of the organizations that would eventually evolve into the National Association of Colored Women.18

Wells’s advocacy of abolition democracy won the approval of Frederick Douglass, the aging lion of Black citizenship, who lauded her public truth-telling about lynching as an outstanding “service which can never be weighed nor measured.” Douglass’s compliment anticipated Wells’s enormously powerful legacy. Her model of leadership proved to be generative: over the years she has inspired and galvanized networks of both new and seasoned Black women activists. Yet Wells also battled patriarchal assumptions regarding Black leadership. She chafed against the top-down approach to leadership exemplified by W. E. B. Du Bois, whose bravura activism in support of Black equality nonetheless exhibited blind spots when it came to women. Six years Wells’s junior, and a newcomer to racial militancy by Wells’s standard, the Fisk- and Harvard-educated Du Bois positioned himself as the progressive alternative to Booker T. Washington’s politics of racial accommodation. And yet Wells’s militancy, determination, relatively humble educational background, and outspoken fearlessness made the urbane Du Bois uncomfortable. He sidelined her in the NAACP when it was established in 1909 even though her work had made the organization’s very existence possible.19

Wells was a trailblazer: a feminist, wife, mother, citizen, and activist who explained why Black life mattered during an era that violently repudiated this notion every day. She engaged in a political struggle to reimagine democracy by advocating for federal anti-lynching legislation. In the process, she amassed one of the largest databases of anti-Black violence ever collected. Ultimately, she turned journalism into both a sword, cutting through the lies of the Lost Cause, and a shield, defending Black lives from the dual indignity of lynch law and the falsehoods that justified it. Through her investigative surveys of the racial violence of the Reconstruction era and beyond, Wells modeled the political and activist energies that have characterized subsequent generations of Black feminist organizers, writers, and thought leaders as they have sought to transform the scope and scale of Black politics.

Ida B. Wells sought not only to defend Black lives jeopardized by white supremacist violence and terror but also to reimagine the American project as a multiracial democracy expansive enough to recognize Black women’s practical, theoretical, and political contributions to the nation. As such, her voice has echoed through history.

This echo reached the Second Reconstruction, when Black activism both consciously and unconsciously drew from Wells’s radical legacy as it bore witness both to the depth of racial oppression and to the possibilities of multiracial democracy. Ella Baker, the organizer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, carried on Wells’s tradition of generative political thought and activism in the face of white racial violence and Black patriarchal assumptions concerning the makeup, character, and purpose of leadership. In her admonishment of the sit-in movement, when she said that civil rights was about more than just a hamburger, Baker sought to highlight the sacred work of radical democracy in which the students were engaged. Black activists were placing their bodies on the front lines against systems of white supremacy that were more deeply entrenched in the civil rights era than they had been even in Wells’s time.

Meanwhile, Fannie Lou Hamer, from Montgomery County, Mississippi, less than one hundred miles south of Wells’s hometown of Holly Springs, also followed Wells’s example. Hamer, born into a sharecropping family in Mississippi in 1917, worked as a sharecropper herself until 1962. But by 1962 she was a voting rights activist, and over the next few years she became a grassroots leader and helped to found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She gave riveting testimony before the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention in 1964. Hamer, like Wells and Baker, offered an example of leadership that, in both style and substance, challenged middle-class, patriarchal, church-based power dynamics within the Black community. She understood Black liberation as embedded in a larger social justice movement. Recognizing that “You are not free, whether you are white or black, until I am free,” Hamer expressed reconstructionist sentiments that aspired, ultimately, to the creation of multiracial democracy in America. She went from merely surviving within a violent Jim Crow system, maintained through ritualized lynchings, to becoming one of the best-known faces of the Second Reconstruction.20 Baker and Hamer, working in the tradition of Wells, and in order to preserve Black lives, made the world think differently about Black bodies.

More than any other activist, Angela Davis’s commitment to abolition democracy makes her a living bridge between the Reconstruction-era Black politics that Wells embodied and the Black Lives Matter movement of the twenty-first century.21 Davis’s advocacy of abolition democracy was evident in both her prisoner rights activism, from the late 1960s onward, and her groundbreaking theoretical contributions to concepts of Black dignity, citizenship, freedom, and democracy. The “Free Angela Davis” campaign, which began after her arrest in 1970 and culminated in her acquittal on all charges by the summer of 1972, helped to ignite a radical movement for prison reform, and then prison abolition, that was at once international in scope and local in focus. As they fought for Davis’s release and for justice for other incarcerated people, Black women organizers at the grass roots carried Ida B. Wells’s torch, spreading the cause of radical struggle for Black humanity, democracy, and citizenship in communities quickly forgotten after the heyday of civil rights victories.22

Davis’s notion of abolition—of slavery, prison, racism, imperialism, war, sexism, and intersectional injustice—took root within a wider Black radical tradition. Black feminism, as practiced by nineteenth- century reconstructionists such as Wells, would prove key to this tradition. The Second Reconstruction included second-wave Black feminist activists who sought to reimagine Black freedom struggles at the local, national, and global levels. They did this through organizations such as the Third World Women’s Alliance, the National Black Feminist Organization, and the Combahee River Collective. Black feminist activists, writers, and theorists such as Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and Fran Beal updated and expanded the works of their forebearers through searing discussions of racism and white supremacy; of rape, domestic violence, and sexual assault, both within the Black community and as committed historically by white men; of the racism of white feminist movements; and much more.

Black feminism in the decades after the heyday of the civil rights and Black Power era flourished in fugitive spaces. Universities, churches, community centers, private homes, playgrounds, and prisons became sites for debates and discussions about leadership that rejected definitions of freedom that marginalized the fullness and complexity of Black women’s humanity. Lorde, an icon of Black lesbian feminist thought, challenged Black people to define freedom in a way that refused to hide parts of our individual and collective identities deemed unworthy by ancient patriarchal hierarchies, contemporary heterosexual norms, and neoliberal capitalist frameworks. “My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly,” Lorde wrote, “allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition.” Black feminism’s search for a leadership model capable of honoring all the “different selves” of Black women—and in doing so, honoring the entire spectrum of the Black community—became one of the focal points of the Black radical tradition by the twenty-first century.23

Indeed, the rise of twenty-first-century Black women’s leadership is rooted in traditions of radical Black activism cultivated during the First Reconstruction, updated and refined during the Second Reconstruction, and fundamentally transformed during the Third Reconstruction. Black feminist politics in the 1980s and 1990s operated on multiple levels, all of which would coalesce in the intersectional impulses that characterize the Black Lives Matter movement. Grassroots activists operating amid the overlapping crises of poverty, structural and domestic violence, the AIDS epidemic, the War on Drugs, and mass incarceration brought together hundreds of organizations that rejected the models of charismatic leadership celebrated in history textbooks and popular culture. During the Age of Ronald Reagan—an era marked by potent stereotypes that cast Black women as “welfare queens,” by the criminalization of Black neighborhoods as crack dens, and by the diversion of resources away from the remnants of the Great Society and into the largest prison system in the world—Black women cultivated political, mutual-aid, and collaborative local groups and networks.

Some of these organizers had heard of Ella Baker, and many had not, but they all carried on in her tradition. They were aware of the disconnect between even the most radically outspoken Black male political leaders (for example, Jesse Jackson, during his bravura 1984 and 1988 campaigns for president) and their own quotidian struggles. Activists created organizations that prioritized the struggles of poor Black women, especially those experiencing domestic violence—for example, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) and the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault (NCASA), which broke new ground in creating spaces for radical Black women organizing against sexual assault, domestic violence, and marginalization during the racially cruel Reagan era.24 Black Queer activists played an integral role in the post-civil-rights era, organizing groups such as Black AIDS Mobilization (BAM), where scholar-activists such as Cathy Cohen helped to place Black Queer leaders and activists squarely within a radical tradition engaged in a painstaking struggle to recognize all aspects of Black humanity.25

Simultaneously, Black feminists engaged in an Ida B. Wells type of narrative war from both above and below. In the quarter century between Angela Davis’s 1972 release from prison and her founding— alongside activists Rose Braz and Ruth Gilmore—of Critical Resistance, a radical organization devoted to eradicating systems and structures of anti-Black punishment, incarceration, and violence, Black feminists created transformative intellectual and theoretical frameworks that reimagined the American project. Their words helped popularize radical new narratives of Black liberation and introduced Wells’s legacy to new generations. These narrative wars took place in academic, political, nonprofit, legal, corporate, and public policy spaces. They influenced, and were influenced by, radical grassroots community organizers, violence disrupters, neighborhood griots, and local keepers of history— Black feminists, Queer people, and at times progressive cisgender Black men.26

The twenty-first-century rise in Black women’s leadership—including Black feminist public intellectuals such as Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Heather McGhee; the investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones; engaged scholar activists such as Barbara Ransby, Keisha Blain, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor; civil rights leaders such as Sherrilyn Ifill and Stacey Abrams; and social movement leaders such as Alicia Garza, Ayọ (Opal) Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors—took place against this backdrop. Crenshaw, for instance, became well known nationally through her work as a critical race theory scholar and her popularization of the term “intersectionality.” Her work expanded upon the political, intellectual, and theoretical thinking of generations of Black feminists who grappled with how Black women’s multiple identities were impacted by systemic racism, violence, and economic inequality.

The Black millennial feminist and Queer activists who launched the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag stood on the shoulders of their forerunners from the Reconstruction, civil rights, and Black Power eras, but they simultaneously innovated new ways of seeing and being. Garza, Tometi, and Cullors turned outrage over Trayvon Martin’s 2012 death into the fuel for a new social movement that tapped into networks, political language, organizing sensibilities, and political visions rooted in the same Black radical tradition that had nurtured Ida B. Wells and Angela Davis. At the same time, Black Lives Matter brought new intellectual clarity, moral urgency, and policy specificity to the fore as it amplified reconstructionist sentiments regarding the value of Black life in the face of racial terror and violence.27

BLM protests in the aftermath of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray drew on the language of intersectional justice rooted in second-wave Black feminism; the grassroots activism of Black women, Queer people, and anti-poverty and anti-domestic-violence workers; and the policy advocacy of Black legal scholars, public defenders, and social movement leaders who continued to agitate in the decades before Barack Obama’s election and during his time in the White House. Exemplifying a commitment to intersectional justice, the Movement for Black Lives activists argued that Black people can only achieve citizenship and dignity by centering the most vulnerable parts of the community, especially women and children; those who are poor or who are facing housing and food insecurity; those in the LGBTQIA+ communities; and the mentally and physically disabled.

By 2020, the extent of the transformation wrought by this new generation became stunningly clear when, on Sunday, June 14, five days before Juneteenth, thousands of demonstrators converged in Brooklyn for a Black Trans Lives Matter rally, also called the Brooklyn Liberation March. The silent demonstration recalled the ten-thousand- strong NAACP march in 1917—the Silent Parade—held to protest a mean season of racial violence in East St. Louis that had killed hundreds of Black people. The Brooklyn protest highlighted the fact that Black transgender people were disproportionately victims of police violence. In the 2020 event a multiracial crowd of fifteen thousand marched from Grand Army Plaza to Fort Green Park before making their way to the Brooklyn Museum. The protest represented one of the most radically democratic moments in American history.28

The Black Trans Lives Matter march reflected the profound reimagining of Black politics, decades in the making, that had taken shape in the neighborhoods, prisons, communities, and streets of America. The idea that all Black lives matter, including the lives of members of the Black LGBTQIA+ communities, had been a cornerstone of BLM’s organizing strategy and political philosophy from its 2013 founding. Much of this theorizing had drawn from the practical intellectual and political work that Black women had done between the end of racial slavery and the present. Over many decades, Black women’s activism helped to shape Black politics even as the women themselves were often relegated to serving behind the scenes, whether as organizers, agitators, or thought leaders. The term “intersectionality” reflects that work and the long road that Black feminist thinkers, activists, and organizers, from Ida B. Wells to the present, traveled to formulate their ideas. If the civil rights movement sought, through the 1963 March on Washington, to turn America into a mass movement meeting, in 2020 BLM succeeded, for the first time in American history, in transforming the entire nation into a classroom.29

Black feminism’s search for liberation paralleled wider currents in American life in 2020, especially those sparked by the New York Times 1619 Project. The initiative was the brainchild of journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who consciously channeled the legacy of anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells into the twenty-first century. Challenging America’s origin story, the 1619 Project opened up new worlds of social, political, and intellectual inquiry. Like many breakthroughs, it also elicited both hearty praise and vicious condemnation. Racial slavery, the wealth it produced, the moral compromises it engendered, and the lies that concealed painful and ugly aspects of the nation’s history all suddenly took center stage. The project’s debut on the four- hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on the shores of Virginia at Jamestown served as a prelude to everything that happened in 2020.

The 1619 Project started as long-form journalism in the August 14, 2019, issue of The New York Times Magazine; eventually it would include a podcast, live events, and a best-selling book. Reactions to this potent entrée into the narrative wars over the meaning of American citizenship, identity, freedom, and democracy continued to unfold as partisan bickering divided the nation during campaign season and thereafter. Reconstructionists embraced the 1619 Project as a long overdue corrective to Lost Cause mythology and narratives of American exceptionalism. Public school educators around the nation used its multimedia resources in their efforts to tell their students a deeper history of America. But the more the accolades grew, the greater the backlash became. Redemptionists challenged the 1619 Project’s historical validity and scholarly rigor. Eventually, they successfully passed legislation, including in my own adopted home state of Texas, to bar the teaching of American history in ways that touched upon racism, slavery, and white supremacy.30

Hannah-Jones’s work updated Wells’s heroic political and intellectual crusade against lynching into a state-of-the-art vivisection of racial slavery’s afterlife in the twenty-first century. Her journalism, like Wells’s, turned one of W. E. B. Du Bois’s observations on its head. Du Bois had described a question that had constantly confronted him but that went unasked: How does it feel to be a problem? In Hannah-Jones’s historical excavation of our national origin story, echoing Wells, Black people not only were not the problem, but they also might be, against all odds, our only hope for salvaging the American democratic project. By arguing that the year 1619 represented the nation’s birth just as well as 1776 did, since racial slavery proved to be the greatest economic engine for all that came after, the 1619 Project became perhaps the most powerful popular distillation of reconstructionist sentiment ever conceived.

As the project told it, in the series of essays in The New York Times Magazine by an all-star team of journalists and scholars, drawing on cutting-edge research on the history and afterlife of slavery, the economics of slavery implicated more than southern plantation owners. Racial slavery was also central to debates over the Constitution and to the language of the Declaration of Independence; it shaped the creation of supply chains of power and privilege that allowed for economic innovation in domestic banking and international finance; and it provided the foundation for the expansion of the continental United States and the growth of its hemispheric and global political and economic ambitions. It also institutionalized the supply chains of misery and inequality in the form of racial segregation, economic theft, violence, and unequal treatment that still touch virtually every aspect of contemporary American life. As the essays implicitly and explicitly argued, these forces continue to shape our national destiny. The 1619 Project held up an unblinking mirror to a nation that had steadily refused to undertake self-examination on the subject of race.

The pushback came immediately, and it only grew over the course of 2020 as teachers began to draw upon or adopt the 1619 Project’s resources. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Republican, characterized the Founding Fathers as viewing slavery as a “necessary evil,” and seemed to suggest that he agreed with that assessment (a charge he later denied). In the Senate, he proceeded to introduce the Saving American History Act, legislation to ban federal funding for the teaching of the 1619 Project in public schools. These efforts were similar to many others in the history of political backlash against reconstructionist attempts to confront America’s long and brutal history of anti-Black racism. The attacks on the 1619 Project paralleled the GOP voter suppression efforts that were taking place at the same time, and both would reach frightening new levels of legislative effectiveness the next year.31

The pushback was so fierce in part because the 1619 Project was only the leading edge of the efforts to reckon honestly with America’s history that were playing out in full view of the public in the spring and summer of 2020. Confederate monuments came tumbling down (while monuments celebrating those who profited from slavery were toppled in England and beyond). And it was not just Confederate generals, politicians, and other sympathizers who came under scrutiny. President Theodore Roosevelt’s support for biological racism against Blacks and other nonwhite people inspired new rounds of criticism. So did Thomas Jefferson’s notoriously racist views on Black intelligence. History museums, art galleries, and other sites of commemoration of American history that had been shaped more by redemptionists than reconstructionists came under new and unprecedented pressure.32

Nearly a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction offered a powerful salvo against Lost Cause narratives depicting Reconstruction’s failures as the self-inflicted wounds of Blacks unable to handle the responsibilities of citizenship and unwilling to carry themselves with human dignity. Du Bois instead described efforts by free Black people, alongside anti-racist whites, to forge a new birth of American freedom —to secure the abolition democracy that was the cutting edge of the nation’s democratic experiment. And in 2020, the Movement for Black Lives pushed the struggle for abolition democracy to the very center of American life, expanding its meaning to include movements to abolish mass incarceration, the death penalty, and other structures of anti-Black racial violence. BLM’s vision of an American democracy that prioritizes the most historically marginalized members of the Black community represented a bold and radical effort to make this newest period of Reconstruction the nation’s last.33

Black communities experienced institutional racism and economic impoverishment long before George Floyd’s death. Racial segregation is rooted in a long history of racial terror and violence in America and a corresponding history of this reality being silenced by the forces of white supremacy. In the early months of 2020, COVID-19 amplified widespread preexisting racial inequities that threatened both the legacy of the civil rights movement and the strength and resilience of American democracy. Structural racism and white supremacy, as embodied in the presidency of Donald J. Trump, played out in the federal response to the pandemic. Black workers were more likely to be in jobs that made them particularly vulnerable both to getting sick and dying and to being subject to layoffs and closures that led to economic ruin. Black prisoners—including many in local jails, such as New York City’s notorious Rikers Island, who were awaiting trial and unable to afford bail—faced a high risk of exposure by virtue of their cramped living quarters. Black small business owners found themselves overwhelmingly excluded from government bailouts that instead directed financial payouts to some of the nation’s largest corporations.

It was against this backdrop that George Floyd’s death reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter protests that had first erupted in 2013. Within twenty-four hours of George Floyd’s death, protesters gathered in Minneapolis, turning the site of his murder into a living memorial filled with expressions of love, grief, and rage. Three days later, a protest targeting the Third Precinct, where the four police officers complicit in Floyd’s death worked, turned violent and left the building in ashes. Within a week, hundreds of demonstrations in cities as diverse as Atlanta, Anchorage, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City erupted.

The multiracial nature of the protests astonished the nation, exhilarating supporters and appalling critics. The overwhelming majority of protests—93 percent, by one estimate—were peaceful. Some drifted into sporadic looting and theft, and in a few cases, the determination to express rage, anger, and grief—not simply over Floyd’s death, but over the larger structures of racial and economic inequality that made such killings routine—devolved into chaos. But the most disturbing displays of violence came from the police, who were deployed not just against Black demonstrators but white ones as well. The image of police in Buffalo, New York, knocking an elderly white protester onto the sidewalk, causing serious injury, went viral. The scene offered the nation a small hint of the kind of state-sanctioned, profoundly unjust punishment and brutality that Black people have routinely experienced since their arrival on the nation’s shores.34

BLM inspired reconstructionist politics from below. The movement’s demands were both particular and general. Its particular goals centered on a massive set of radical policy reforms seeking the transformation of America’s criminal punishment system and the far-flung ecosystem that nourished it. This agenda called for a radical redistribution of local, state, and national resources away from punishment and incarceration to investment, restorative justice, and anti-racism. Practically speaking, this meant shifting funding from law enforcement into mental health, drug rehabilitation, housing, education, and other investments designed to promote Black health and wellness rather than incarceration and death.35

BLM’s general impulses were in certain ways even more revolutionary than its specific proposals. Organizers identified police violence as the central spoke in the wheel of American exceptionalism. Eradicating the nation’s sprawling punishment system, they argued, could end the structures of violence, poverty, and death that have historically denigrated Black bodies. This framework was the necessary response to the nation’s long and catastrophic history of using the police to enforce a color line that prevents Black Americans not only from achieving citizenship and dignity, but from even aspiring to do so through political organizing and movement building. The struggle for Black equality as defined by BLM meant defeating the ancient regime of white supremacy and replacing it with a new political reality wherein all Black lives mattered. This aim could only be achieved through a focus on the particular struggle of Black people and by defeating the political and narrative frameworks that supported America’s racial status quo.

Their deceptively simple argument since 2013 had been that the criminal justice system extended its tentacles of racial and economic oppression into social welfare, education, housing, and employment. And after Floyd’s death, that argument went mainstream. Calls to reimagine public safety by “defunding” the police injected urgent new language into the wider public debate about the value of Black lives in America. Grassroots Black Reconstructionists turned “Defund the Police” into a radical political axiom, making it the focus of posters and signs and even painting it in gigantic yellow letters on a street near the White House. The phrase’s narrative power could be seen both by the passionate nationwide support it received and by the ferocity of the opposition it evoked. “Defund the Police” derived its political impact, its policy influence, and its controversy from its narrative power. Like the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” it told the nation an important story— not the one it wanted to hear but the one it needed to.36

As “Defund the Police” went mainstream, so, too, did calls for intersectional justice, attentive to the myriad ways that different identities—racial, class, sexual orientation and gender identification, mental health, and citizenship status—interacted in the policies and politics that shaped the lives of Americans. As a new era of Black Reconstruction transformed American democracy amid a global pandemic, a plague of police brutality, and the scourge of poverty, racism, and violence, the search for Black humanity became a metaphor for multiracial groups of Americans burdened by the weight of structural violence and oppression. With its call for intersectional justice, BLM extended and amplified both Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of radical Black citizenship and Malcolm X’s vision of radical Black dignity.

The pandemic, police brutality, racial segregation, and mass unemployment affected the entire country, but their impacts differed based on wealth, geography, family and kinship networks, housing access, social media and Internet availability, and the environment. Access to twenty-first-century citizenship revolved around deeply entrenched racial divides that in turn affected economic status and varied depending on gender, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identification. What critics dismissed as “identity politics” in fact reflected the most widespread public acknowledgment in the nation’s history of the true complexity of white supremacy in all its myriad forms. In a year filled with historical moments, the national reckoning on race and democracy that identified white supremacy as a disease eating away at the body politic proved to be the most significant.

George Floyd’s death opened up new political worlds. The political fires that flared in American cities during the spring and summer of 2020 represented the power of a Black Lives Matter movement that had been preparing for the arrival of a hinge moment in American history since 2013. Once, police violence, brutality, and even murder had been seen as disconnected from the political structures that allowed some people and not others access to excellent schools, clean air and water, safe neighborhoods, good jobs, and thriving futures. Within the crucible of 2020’s national and political reckoning on racial injustice, economic inequality, and the ever-present threat of violence from local, state, and federal authorities against peaceful demonstrators, and illuminated by history, these connections now came into sharp relief. The result was a national conversation not only about criminal justice and policing, but also about democratic institutions in American society writ large. (Nor were these issues of anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and systemic economic oppression only being discussed in America. International sympathy protests in cities such as Berlin, Munich, London, and Oxford paralleled the reckoning in America, helping to make the Movement for Black Lives perhaps the largest international human rights project ever conceived.) As in the two earlier periods of Reconstruction, in 2020 we arrived, bloodied and battered, but still hopeful, as a new generation, at the moment of a new opportunity to reach toward the creation of a new country, one both unencumbered by its tragic racial past and strengthened by a public commitment to repairing and healing racial wounds through the practice of justice.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, after originating as rearguard, reconstructionist efforts to advocate for Black dignity and citizenship during the Age of Obama, evolved into a frontal assault on the American democratic imagination. The protests redrew the lines of acceptable discourse within Black politics and asserted a new kind of leadership. Black women emerged as some of the protests’ leading architects. The dynamic role of Black feminist and Queer organizers, activists, artists, and elected officials was reflected in the growing iconography surrounding Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old emergency room technician killed after midnight on March 13, 2020 (over two months before Floyd’s murder), in a raid by Louisville, Kentucky, police who misidentified her and her boyfriend as drug dealers. Taylor became, alongside Floyd, the face of the demands for an end to anti-Black police violence and a national symbol of the BLM protests. Her countenance graced the cover of Vanity Fair and helped to expand the literal and metaphorical boundaries of Black politics. In 2020, Black women’s long-standing efforts to reimagine Black politics moved from the margins of political and intellectual discourse in America to its center.37

In 2008, brown hands that once picked cotton helped to elect America’s first Black president. In 2020, Black folk, led by unapologetically Queer and radically feminist women, articulated the most expansive vision of Black politics in history, and in so doing reimagined American democracy. This is not to suggest that intraracial ideological struggles, conflicts, disagreements, and confrontations ceased to exist. But the frameworks for these disputes, as well as the basis for multiracial and interracial coalitions, fundamentally changed. Nowhere could this be seen more clearly than in the way that local governments scrambled to respond to the groundswell created by Black-led grassroots political movements advocating for the redistribution of wealth and the end of punishment in poor communities.