On Monday, January 20, two political legacies will collide in real time. Donald Trump will become our 47th president on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It feels poetic in the worst possible way. The cartoonish bully apparently intent on destroying civil rights — among countless other hard-won freedoms — will assume power on the day we celebrate a civil rights icon. I can already see the memes that will fill up my family’s group chat, comparing the holy patron saint MLK Jr. to a man with 34 felony convictions and an insurrection to his name.
But Monday is about more than two men or their dueling legacies. There are also two political cycles that will come to a head: Reconstruction and Redemption. Pick up any McGraw Hill textbook and you can read that we’ve had only one round of Reconstruction and Redemption in the US. Reconstruction, the textbooks say, was the transformative period immediately after the Civil War, from roughly 1865 to 1877, when the US sought to integrate newly emancipated Black Americans into its institutions and workplaces. Redemption was the violent white supremacist backlash, ignited by Southerners.
But the story isn’t so simple. At the end of his life, King believed the “black revolution” went beyond the issue of civil rights for Black Americans; it was about confronting “racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism” and required a “radical reconstruction of society.” That reconstruction, a decades-long political struggle that is often downplayed in how we mythologize King, became broadly known as the Civil Rights Movement. It ushered in our second attempt at making multiracial democracy real. Undeniably, Trump is an enemy of that legacy, but he seems intent on going even further. He wants to destroy many of the gains of our first Reconstruction. He’s championing a new age of Redemption.
Redeemers were, first and foremost, losers. Literally. They lost their right to exploit, enslave, and subjugate entire groups of people after the Civil War. Never mind that President Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate soldiers “unconditionally and without reservation” in 1868 or that a number of enslavers received reparations to compensate for their “lost property”; Redeemers wanted the old ways — the old America — back.
That mission was supercharged when Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to pull federal troops out of the former Confederate states as part of a compromise that secured his victory in the disputed 1877 presidential election. Redeemers finally had freedom again — freedom to violently seize elections and purge Black people from political office and the voter rolls. It was the “resurgence and bloody normalization of White Power politics,” historian N.D.B. Connolly wrote in Boston Review, a time when “southern whites took over the political and propaganda apparatus in all eleven states of the former Confederacy.” This period, also known as “the nadir,” or the lowest point, overlapped with the Gilded Age. If you’ve seen the HBO show, you might associate that phrase with incredible gowns, Meryl Streep’s daughter, and rich people fighting over who has more money. But it was also a period, from roughly the 1870s to the early 1900s, when the super-rich rose to power and political corruption ran rampant.
