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For a brief time following the end of the U.S. Civil War, American political leaders had an opportunity - slim, to be sure, but not beyond the realm of possibility - to remake society so that black Americans and other persons of color could enjoy equal opportunity in civil and political life. It was not to be. With each passing year after the war - and especially after Reconstruction ended during the 1870s - American society witnessed the evolution of a new white republic as national leaders abandoned the promise of Reconstruction and justified their racial biases based on political, economic, social, and religious values that supplanted the old North-South/slavery-abolitionist schism of the antebellum era.A Long Dark Night provides a sweeping history of this too often overlooked period of African American history that followed the collapse of Reconstruction - from the beginnings of legal segregation through the end of World War II.



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