Jim Crow lasted for nearly a century. It took the full force of the civil rights movement, from boycotts to marches and laws like the 1965 VRA, to create a Second Reconstruction, meant to redeem the squandered promise of the first. The VRA made America a truly multiracial democracy for the first time in its history. Today, there are more than 10,000 Black elected officials throughout the country, far surpassing the numbers following the Civil War.

Yet by destroying the VRA and gutting the 14th and 15th amendments, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has essentially ended the Second Reconstruction.

Its logic for shredding the country’s most important civil rights law replicates the worst impulses of the Supreme Court in the 19th century. To truly understand the scope and origins of the disaster that the Roberts court has unleashed, you have to return to one of the darkest periods of our history.___