America’s Three Reconstructions

“America’s Three Reconstructions” will compare three moments in U.S. history (slave emancipation in the late 1860s-70s; the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s-70s; and the “post-racial” era following the election of Barack Obama in 2008-16) where black political activism and the crumbling of white supremacy initiated new concerns over guns, crime, and armed self-defense. In all three of these Reconstructions, guns have played important yet under-appreciated roles in both securing freedom and civil rights for African Americans as well as undoing many of those gains by reinvigorating grassroots white conservatism as well as outright violence.