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1865 to 1880s: Have we learned *and* gained nothing in the 156 years as 2021 arrives?

From the winner of 2019 Pulitzer Prize: Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

Douglass found himself in a position, a decade and a half after emancipation, not unlike many leaders of the modern civil rights movement. They have to fight to protect political and constitutional triumphs, as well as a new national historical memory, while they also face a deepening crisis of structural repression and inequality. Douglass's story, when he was heroically right as well as disappointingly wrong, was a rehearsal for the long haul of postemancipation and post-civil rights black and progressive leadership who have encountered foes as virulent as the Democratic Party's Southern Redeemers of the 1870s and much of the Republican Party  in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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