In his opinion piece "Why Reconstruction Matters," historian Eric Foner admonishes us to take the Rconstruction period seriously:
Issues that agitate American politics today — access to citizenship and voting rights, the relative powers of the national and state governments, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism — all of these are Reconstruction questions. But that era has long been misunderstood.
This is not fully formed analysis, but I wanted to put a thought out there, and maybe someone will tell me whether it has merit. As Foner notes, it has been suggested, by Manning Marable among others, that America has gone through a Second Reconstruction, roughly 100 years after the first. The dramatic gains achieved during the Civil Rights era parallel the gains seen immediately following the Civil War. But after the first Reconstruction came the Post-Reconstruction. Once the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Cruikshank abandoned Black Republicans to the racial terrorism of southern White Democrats and the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow could be established to safeguard White supremacy almost as securely as slavery.
The Equal Justice Initiative report on lynching details the patterns and practices that led to almost 4,000 terror lynchings of Blacks in 12 southern states between 1877 and 1950.