Kamala Harris, Hope, and the Third Reconstruction

The Democrats’ celebration of the swap-out of the old guard for the next generation is almost complete, and the speechifying almost over. With horse race–obsessed journalists convulsed by the slightest shifts to shades of blue in the polling universe, Vice President Kamala Harris has tempered expectations and embraced her status as the underdog—or, at best, an underdog with momentum—on the rocky road to the White House. The hysteria over President Joe Biden’s competency that chased him from the race was quickly stifled by eruptions of joy, excitement, and hope that greeted Harris’s unexpected elevation. “The contagious power of hope,” as former first lady Michelle Obama declared Tuesday night, “is making a comeback.” Hope is a time-honored watchword of Reconstruction, the three major eras of social, economic, and political upheaval that have defined the African American experience. Black gains have always been followed by deep retrenchment. The First Reconstruction delivered a blink of liberation before Jim Crow yanked African Americans back to peonage and terrorism. Decades of bloody mid-century skirmishes in the South birthed the civil rights movement and the Second Reconstruction, the greatest leap forward for one of the most maligned peoples on the planet. More from Gabrielle Gurley The...