Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Chapter 1 of Stony the Road presents the contemporary US against the backdrop of the post-Civil War era. It begins with the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the US presidency, which Gates compares to three momentous events in Black history: the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), the legal abolishment of enslavement with the ratification of the 13th Amendment (1865), and the Reconstruction Acts that reintegrated the South into the Union (1867-68). For many commentators, Obama’s election marked the “dawn of a post-racial America” (2). It also revived the metaphor of the “New Negro”—a “new” type of Black person who was educated, eloquent, and elegant. For Gates, the evocation of the New Negro connected Obama’s presidency to the post-Reconstruction era, the period in which the term was coined to combat rising racism in the South. Gates compares the dismantling of Reconstruction gains during Redemption and Jim Crow to the rollback of Obama-era policies by the alt-right under the leadership of Obama’s successor, Donald J. Trump. According to Gates, the election of the first Black president triggered a public expression of white supremacy that harkened back to the post-Reconstruction era.