I woke up this morning feeling numb from the news out of Mississippi. Another young person taken far too early, without cause. As the facts trickle out, it feels like a dance we’ve seen before: a young Black person finds himself in the wrong company, and doesn’t make it home. A sad story. A familiar one.
On the surface, these tragedies seem to be happening more often. But pull back far enough, and a larger pattern comes into view: tremendous progress, followed by a swift, overwhelming backlash. Forces we once believed were aligned with our interests turn out, in the end, to stifle our dreams and choke off our opportunities. This pattern runs through the Reconstruction eras in American history, and the “deconstructions” that followed each one.
But there is another pattern alongside it: resilience, built on hope and the refusal to despair. Even as the world burns around them, the spirit of a people fights toward a new day their forefathers could scarcely have conceived of.
Get Up
The first Reconstruction, after the Civil War, held enormous promise. African Americans and their Northern allies helped liberate the country from chattel slavery, and rapid social and economic progress followed. The country as a whole grew and prospered, poised for true greatness.
But that era was short-lived, cut down by violence against the very communities who had fought for freedom, liberty, and justice, turning back the clock and ushering in the long night of Jim Crow. A season that lasted nearly a century.
What strikes me most, reading the accounts of that era (the lynchings, the towns burned to the ground) is that people still got up. They got up every day and went to work. They got up and went to school, finding new ways to educate themselves. They got up and found new ways to love one another. When Jim Crow tried to hold them down, they kept getting up.
I think of a story closer to home, one that I recently heard about. A boy in India, born in 1944, shattered his dominant hand in two accidents by the age of seven. He missed five years of school. His family had every reason to write him off. But his mother refused to. She tutored him herself, at their kitchen table, and, unaware he was also quietly battling dyslexia, prepared him, piece by piece, to go back into a classroom that had already moved on without him. Her instruction to him, the one he carried the rest of his life, was simple: wake up, look up, and don’t give up.
He graduated medical school with honors at twenty-two, arrived in America in 1967 with five dollars in his pocket, and trained at Harlem Hospital, in the same neighborhood this paper calls home, before going on to perform more than fifteen thousand open-heart surgeries. Arun K. Singh’s hands, once thought too damaged to hold a pen, went on to hold the beating hearts of thousands of strangers and keep them alive.
That is what getting up looks like. Not the absence of the wound, but the refusal to let it be the last word.
Also around this time, a young preacher had a dream, and the first deconstruction finally began to end.
Look Up
Who can forget the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., a young Baptist preacher from the South who put God first in the fight for equality. His multiethnic movement brought down those who stood in the way of human progress and helped make America, at last, a little more free. The promises of the first Reconstruction came due through the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the lifting of discriminatory immigration restrictions.
That movement was carried not only by marchers in the streets, but by allies working quietly behind the scenes. Daniel Rose, one of the founders of this very paper, sat down with Dr. King and, moved by that conversation, became a discreet financier of the movement, one of many hands that kept the engine of the Second Reconstruction running, without ever needing his name on a banner. History remembers the man at the pulpit. It rarely remembers everyone who kept the lights on behind him.
As with the first Reconstruction, massive progress followed. The American Dream had never felt so within reach: from the 1970s through the 1990s, Black economic progress alone grew into the trillions annually, alongside record college enrollment and homeownership. The dream carried the country to higher ground than it had ever stood on.
But as with all dreams, this one came to an end. First deindustrialization, then heroin and crack cocaine flooding the streets, job training cut, and access to business loans curtailed. The second deconstruction had begun. Yet through it all, Black folks, and Americans broadly, kept looking up, finding ways to survive and thrive against overwhelming odds, trusting that a new day would come.
And it did.
Don’t Give Up
A third Reconstruction began in earnest with the election of Barack Obama. His campaign’s message of hope drew Americans of every background, weary of discord in the cities and deepening enmity between parties and races. It was a message built not on certainty, but on the discipline of not giving up. And it paid off.
The country was pulled back from the brink of a banking and real estate collapse. Rights were extended to groups who had waited generations for them. The economy improved broadly, and for a moment, America seemed to be healing. This third Reconstruction looked like it might finally bury the fractures of the past.
But the pattern repeated. The forces of deconstruction reared up again, through violence and direct assaults on the Constitution itself, leaving many Americans confused and disheartened, with racism and sexism resurgent to levels unseen since the second deconstruction, and every sign pointing to more of the same ahead.
So ask yourself: what do we do next? The pattern is clear: win, then lose, win, then lose. But we have also learned something else: in the losing, there are higher places we’re pushed to climb toward. After every Reconstruction and every deconstruction, new ideas were born, and new doors opened for all.
So to those in despair, I say what has been said before, and will need saying again:
Get up. Look up. And never give up!