We tend to Tik Tok-speed scroll through these decades of the nation’s timeline. We fast-forward like Dr. Who’s Time Machine through the years and years and years between the legal end of enslavement in the 1860s and the nascent days of the civil rights movement a century later.
That time is generally labeled Reconstruction. Though it could just as easily be called Construction given the countless barriers erected to prevent the newly free from achieving anything close to equality of opportunity. Equality of dignity. Any efforts towards such were delayed, denied, or destroyed by Black Codes, Jim Crow, redlining, and such.
Or killed. Lynched…