The civil rights movement was the second, not first, mass Black democratization effort

Evidence

Just as white Americans feared, World War II ignited what became Black Americans’ second sustained effort to democratize this nation. As the editorial board of the Black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “We wage a two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave us.” Woodard’s blinding is largely seen as one of the catalysts for the decades-long rebellion we have come to call the civil rights movement. But it is useful to pause and remember that this was the second mass movement for Black civil rights, after Reconstruction. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 162

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the reader’s case study of contested periodization — naming the civil rights movement the ‘second’ effort reframes Reconstruction as the first, an origin-dating move parallel to the counterfactual of the Revolutionary War.