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Garza: In 2018 and 2019, my organization, Black Futures Lab, did what we believe is the largest survey of black communities in America. It’s called the Black Census Project. We asked more than 30,000 black people across America what we experience, what we want to see happen instead and what we long for, for our futures.

There are a host of things that the police are currently responding to that they have no business responding to.

A tiny percentage of people are the ones destabilizing communities

In many cities, the police spend a lot of time “on traffic and motor-vehicle issues, on false burglar alarms, on noise complaints and on problems with animals,”

There has been such a massive disinvestment in the social safety net that should exist to give black communities an opportunity to thrive, whether it’s access to health care or housing or education or jobs.

Similarly, if you have a homeless man panhandling at a red light and you say to a cop, “Go fix it,” he’ll arrest the man. And now he has a $250 ticket. And how does he pay that? And what does any of this accomplish?

domestic disputes. They’re the subject of 15 to more than 50 percent of calls to the police

The women were deeply wary of the police in general, but 33 of them had called them at least once, often for help with a teenager. “Calling the police on family members deepens the reach of penal control,” Bell wrote. But the mothers in her study have scant options.

Mary Rowlandson was a Puritan woman whom Native American tribes captured and imprisoned for several weeks during King Philip’s War. After her release, she wrote The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which was published in 1682. The book was an immediate sensation that was reissued in multiple editions for over a century."But now, the next morning, I must turn my back upon the town, and travel with th

Bryan delivered one of the greatest political speeches in American history, the "Cross of Gold" Speech

Several third parties were active in 1896. By far the most prominent was the Populist Party

Formed in 1892, the Populists represented agrarian interests in the South, West, and rural Midwest.

In the 1892 presidential election Populist candidate James B. Weaver had carried four states, and in 1894 the Populists had scored victories in congressional and state legislature races in a number of Southern and Western states.

By 1896 some Populists believed that they could replace the Democrats as the main opposition party to the Republicans.

At their national convention in 1896, the Populists chose Bryan as their presidential nominee.

With this election, the Populists began to be absorbed into the Democratic Party; within a few elections the party would disappear completely

Roosevelt won the governorship of New York in 1928--one of the few Democrats to survive the Republican landslide. Surrounding himself with able advisors, Roosevelt labored to convert New York into a laboratory for reform, involving conservation, old-age pensions, public works projects, and unemployment insurance.

a New Deal for the American people

policy of experimentation

Capitol Men

Dray's

It does not really offer an assessment of Reconstruction's successes and failings

Twelve years earlier, Smalls had piloted the Planter, on which he worked as a slave crewman, out of Charleston harbor and delivered it to the Union navy, a deed that made him a national hero. In 1864, while the ship was undergoing repairs in Philadelphia, a conductor evicted Smalls from a streetcar when he refused to give up his seat to a white passenger. Ninety years before a similar incident involving Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Smalls's ordeal inspired a movement of black and white reformers to persuade the Pennsylvania legislature to ban discrimination in public transportation.

Stephens offered a long argument based on states' rights as to why the bill was unconstitutional.

The subject of their exchange was a civil rights bill banning racial discrimination in places of public accommodation.

Elliott launched into a learned and impassioned address explaining why the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment justified the measure (which was signed into law by President Grant the following year), then reminded Congress of an infamous speech Stephens had delivered on the eve of the Civil War: "It is scarcely twelve years since that gentleman shocked the civilized world by announcing the birth of a government which rested on human slavery as its cornerstone." Elliott already had proved that he refused to be intimidated by whites: in 1869 he whipped a white man in the streets of Columbia for writing inappropriate notes to his wife. A black man assaulting a white man in defense of his wife's good name was not a common occurrence in nineteenth-century South Carolina.

Congressmen Dray profiles came from diverse origins and differed in their approach to public policies. Some had been free before the Civil War, others enslaved

Some favored government action to distribute land to former slaves; others insisted that in a market society the only way to acquire land was to purchase it. Some ran for office as representatives of their race, others as exemplars of the ideal that, with the end of slavery and the advent of legal equality, race no longer mattered. Reconstruction's black Congressmen did not see themselves simply as spokesmen for the black community

was one of the more conservative black leaders; yet in the Senate he spoke out for more humane treatment of Native Americans and opposed legislation banning immigration from China

sixteen black members of Congress

had enjoyed opportunities and advantages unknown to most African-Americans

had been born free in North Carolina

was the slave son of his owner and was educated by the same tutor who taught his white half-siblings.

Some Congressmen had enjoyed unique privileges as slaves.

wner allowed him to learn to read and write and to run a hotel and livery stable in Selma

Others, however, had experienced slavery in all its brutality.

Jeremiah Haralson

None of these men fit the old stereotype of Reconstruction officials as ignorant, incompetent and corrupt.

All were literate, most were seasoned political organizers by the time of their election and nearly all were honest.

ne who does fit the image of venality wa

of Louisiana, whose career combined staunch advocacy of civil rights with a sharp eye for opportunities to line his pockets

Pinchback grew up and attended school in Cincinnati. In the 1850s he worked as a cabin boy on an Ohio River steamboat. He fell in with a group of riverboat gamblers and learned their trade. He turned up in New Orleans in 1862 and expertly navigated the byzantine world of Louisiana's Reconstruction politics. Pinchback was undoubtedly corrupt (he accumulated a small fortune while in office) but also an accomplished politician.

Reconstruction ended in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes abandoned the idea of federal intervention to protect the rights of black citizens in the South, essentially leaving their fate in the hands of local whites.

black political power, while substantially diminished, did not vanish until around 1900, when the Southern states disenfranchised black voters. Six more African-Americans served in Congress before the end of the nineteenth century. Some of their Reconstruction predecessors remained active in politics

of Planter fame, served as customs collector at Beaufort until 1913, when he was removed as part of a purge of blacks from the federal bureaucracy by Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president since Reconstruction.

Pinchback and Bruce moved to Washington, where they became leaders of the city's black elite and arbiters of federal patronage appointments for African-Americans. Bruce worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to persuade Congress to reimburse blacks who had deposited money in the Freedman's Savings Bank, which failed during the Panic of 1873. Like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in our own time, the bank was a private corporation chartered by Congress that enjoyed the implicit but not statutory backing of the federal government. Its counterparts today are being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars, as they have been deemed too big to fail. The Freedman's Savings Bank was too black to rescue.

The last black Congressman of the post-Reconstruction era wa

of North Carolina, whose term ended in 1901. From then until 1929, when

took his seat representing Chicago, Congress remained lily-white. Not until 1972, with

election in Georgia and

in Texas, did black representation resume from states that had experienced Reconstruction. Today the Congressional Black Caucus numbers forty-two members, seventeen of them from the states of the old Confederacy.

One such episode involves

who in 1874 was elected to Congress from Beaufort County, South Carolina.

Equally riveting is the 1874 confrontation between

he former vice president of the Confederacy, then representing Georgia in the House of Representatives, and another black South Carolinian,

Robert Brown Elliott (1842-1884) was an African American member of the United States House of Representatives from South Carolina. Robert Brown Elliott's early life is a mystery. Although he claimed to have been born in Liverpool, England to West Indian immigrants, and to have graduated from Eton College, biographers have been unable to corroborate these facts. He moved to South Carolina in 1867 and established a law practice. Elliott helped organize the local Republican Party and served in the state constitutional convention. In 1868 he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. The next year he was appointed assistant adjutant-general; he was the first African American commanding general of the South Carolina National Guard. As part of his job, he helped form a state militia to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Elliott was elected as a Republican to the Forty-second and Forty-third United States Congress. He "delivered a celebrated speech" in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.[1] He resigned on November 1, 1874, to fight political corruption in South Carolina. He served again in the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he was elected as Speaker of the House. He ran unsuccessfully for South Carolina Attorney General in 1876. Reconstruction ended that year and he was forced out of office.[] He set up a private law practice in New Orleans.

Did You Know? Howard University, a historically all-black school in Washington, D.C., was established in 1867 and named for Oliver Howard, one of its founders and the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He served as the university's president from 1869 to 1874.

There was no tradition of government responsibility for a huge refugee population and no bureaucracy to administer a large welfare, employment and land reform program

4 million newly freed blacks

When Congress introduced a bill in February 1866 to extend the bureau’s tenure and give it new legal powers, Johnson vetoed the proposed legislation on the grounds that it interfered with states’ rights, gave preference to one group of citizens over another and would impose a huge financial burden on the federal government, among other issues.

as well as removing bureau employees he thought were too sympathetic to blacks

Johnson’s actions, which included pardoning many former Confederates and restoring their land,

there was disagreement over what type of assistance the government should provide and for how long.

covering the 11 former rebel states, the border states of Maryland, Kentucky and West Virginia and Washington, D.C. Each district was headed by an assistant commissioner.

achievements varied

the bureau was underfunded and understaffed,

Bureau agents, who acted essentially as social workers

were subjected to ridicule and violence

Ku Klux Klan) who viewed the agents as interfering in local affairs by trying to assist blacks

fed millions of people,

medical aid,

settled labor disputes.

locate lost relatives

building thousands of schools for blacks

found such colleges as Howard University in Washington, D.C

Fisk University in Nashville

Hampton University

most of the confiscated or abandoned Confederate land was eventually restored to the original owners

dismantled the Freedmen’s Bureau

summer of 1872,

the bureau’s efforts did signal the introduction of the federal government into issues of social welfare and labor relations