This monograph provides an interesting analysis of the conundrum of “race” as a marker of human and citizenship inequality in the United States. As Richard Johnson argues, “race” serves as a propellant for, and constraint on, the long-standing struggle to transform America into a genuine democracy with full citizenship rights for African Americans after the Civil War and for other minority communities as it has evolved into a multiracial representative polity.

The study is an extended exploration of the ways in which US society has grappled with the demon of race as a marker of citizenship for African Americans. The author explores the first attempt made in the aftermath of the Civil War, using the Union Army to occupy Southern states to ensure that the federal government’s policies were enacted, especially the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which extended the right to vote to African American males. That attempt ended in 1876—the centennial year of the US Declaration of Independence—when Union forces were withdrawn from the South. The withdrawal of the federal forces from the South opened the way for the Southern states to reverse many of the initiatives of the Reconstruction era by suppressing the African American vote and thereby limiting African American representation at both state and federal levels. Even before the withdrawal of federal military forces, the US Supreme Court had resurrected the principle of dual sovereignty (under which federal sovereignty could be limited or abrogated by states) in the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases, despite enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 1896, the US Supreme Court reaffirmed citizenship inequality for African Americans with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that stated, “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation.” In thus articulating the logic of “separate but equal,” the Supreme Court majority was asserting that it was not inclined to address citizenship inequality on the basis of race as a marker of social status. In effect, the North had won the Civil War, but the South—within a generation—had won the peace and engaged in its own version of a “Bourbon restoration” through the Plessy decision.

Of course, the sole dissent issued in the Plessy case by Justice John Harlan was a pointed critique of this flawed decision: “ The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.” Harlan’s now-famous dissent not only focused on civil freedom and equality before the law but also contradicted the Plessy decision by arguing that social inequality could be a barrier to full citizenship. Some seven decades later, Harlan’s stance on political equality would be vindicated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), which opened the path to the fulfillment of claims for full and equal citizenship among historically disadvantaged members of society. Johnson offers a persuasive analysis, showing that the demise of the First Reconstruction had sown the seeds of the Second Reconstruction—which emerged as a dynamic force nearly seven decades later in the second half of the twentieth century.

As Johnson argues, the continued isolation/segregation of African Americans on the basis of race after Plessy opened the way for the effective restoration of slavery and its denial of their citizenship rights and opportunities through the politics of violent oppression. In 1898 the violent overthrow of an elected biracial government in Wilmington, North Carolina, signaled the emergence of a determination among “unreconstructed” whites that violence was necessary to ensure that African Americans were not placed on the same plane of access to political power. Similarly, the energies of the Ku Klux Klan were devoted to institutionalizing a culture of terror and violence to ensure the continued subordination of African Americans within the wider society.

In 1901, Mark Twain wrote an unsparingly satirical essay, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” in which he unflinchingly explored the increasing resort to lynching in America and the significance of communitarian support for this violent ritual in American culture. As Johnson shows, the culture that fostered racially targeted violence against African Americans after the First Reconstruction was designed to cultivate and enhance ideas of racial solidarity among whites and to enforce—legally and illegally—the politics of white supremacy.

Johnson argues that this culture of terror was accompanied by the practical reimposition of slavery in the South under Jim Crow, and thus follows in the tradition of Douglas Blackmon’s book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, as well as the earlier work of Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969. In effect, the restoration of de facto slavery in the American South was one consequence of the end of the First Reconstruction, and it was facilitated by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Criminalization became a pathway to the institutionalization of a new system of forced labor after the Civil War, a practice that has continued into the twenty-first century despite the Second Reconstruction.

Johnson reminds us that the Brown v. the Board of Education (1954) decision that invalidated Plessy v. Ferguson and arguably ushered in the Second Reconstruction aspired to set US society on the path to citizenship equality without regard to race across American society. In the wake of World War II, the US public’s exposure to the horrendous consequences of genocide that defined the war forced a reassessment of the politics of race in American life. However, the Warren Court’s assumption that equal access to education offered an antidote to the racial hierarchy that defined American life from its earliest years failed to recognize that the American devotion to the idea of race as a hierarchical structure could not be easily disavowed. Nonetheless, the civil rights movements thaat reshaped American political life in the second half of the twentieth century redefined the idea of citizenship in an increasingly diverse society. Unfortunately, the United States remains trapped within the psychological and institutional prison of white supremacy.

On July 16, 2015, Donald Trump, 69 years old and a serially bankrupt former casino magnate, announced his candidacy for the presidency in the 2016 election. The next day, July 17, 2015, a 24-year-old white supremacist, Dylan Roof, murdered nine African Americans in the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Despite the age difference, both Trump and Roof aspired to see the reestablishment of a white supremacist regime in American life. The Second Reconstruction had ended.

In this monograph, Richard Johnson makes a powerful case for the study of the cyclical influence of race and racism as institutional features in American politics and culture. He helps us recognize that, in many ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same.