Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

The term Jim Crow refers to segregation laws that emerged in the South in the 1870s in response to Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 overturned Jim Crow laws.

Monogenesis is a theory that all humans descend from a single origin. For Christian proponents of monogenesis, all humans, regardless of race, are descendants of the biblical Adam and Eve.

Reverend W. E. C. Wright coined the term New Negro in 1895 to refer to a “new” kind of Black person who was middle-class, educated, and cultured. New Negroes defined themselves in opposition to Old Negroes—poor, uneducated formerly enslaved people and their descendants. The New Negro emerged in response to the proliferation of racist imagery and the emergence of Jim Crow segregation after the Reconstruction period. Successive versions of the New Negro emerged over time, including the more militant New Negro of the early 20th century.

The theory of polygenesis holds that the different races originated from independent stocks. Some polygenists argued that the races originated simultaneously, but from different “creation centers,” while others believed that Black people were a separate species entirely, an idea central to white supremacy.

Reconstruction is a period in US history that began in 1865, after the American Civil War, and lasted until 1877. The goals of Reconstruction were twofold: to rebuild the country by reintegrating the former Confederate states into the Union; and to enact social, economic, and political changes to address the inequities created by enslavement. Key achievements of Reconstruction were the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which abolished enslavement, gave formerly enslaved people citizenship, and gave Black men the right to vote.

The term Redemption refers to the period in American history immediately following Reconstruction. It began in 1877, when white Democrats regained control of the former Confederate states, and reached its height in 1915, when President Wilson praised D. W. Griffith’s white supremacist film The Birth of a Nation. The systematic erasure of Reconstruction gains and the rise of white supremacy characterize the Redemption period.