America’s Third Reconstruction also parallels and echoes the Second. We usually consider the years between 1954 and 1968 as the Civil Rights Movement’s (CRM) Heroic Period. Or at least I have argued this for the last 20 years. This period between the Brown SCOTUS desegregation

decision and MLK’s assassination unfolds with a cinematic intensity. Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Little Rock Central HS Crisis, Greensboro, NC sit-ins and creation of SNCC, Freedom Rides, Ole Miss, Birmingham, The Fire Next Time, Medgar Evers Assassination,

March on Washington, 16th Street Baptist Church, MX Message to the Grassroots, JFK Assassination, Freedom Summer, Civil Rights Act, Selma, Voting Rights Act, Great Society, Black Power, urban rebellions, racial backlash and more have become the standard way of viewing this era.

But we should reframe and reimagining the chronology, historical actors, and intent and ambitions of this period. America’s Second Reconstruction was actually rooted in the Freedom Dreams borne out of the Great Depression, anti-colonialism at home and abroad, Double V Campaign

that tried to reimagine democracy, citizenship, dignity, and human rights on a global scale. Much of the progress we saw in the 1960s seemed closer to being achieved during the 1940s, which Black radicals connected to a panoramic tradition of political activism rooted in the

Black church, socialism, Marxism, liberal integration, nationalism, feminism, and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist organizations, groups, and activism, organized movements to disrupt White Supremacy domestically and internationally. The activism of Ella Baker, WEB DuBois, Paul

Robeson, Claudia Jones, Vicki Garvin, and so many others paved the way for #MLK #MX and the generation of lore familiar civil rights/Black Power leaders and icons. These radical internationalists charged the US with human rights violations at home and abroad, challenged the

growing and destructive belief in an American Exceptionalism rooted in Big Lies based on Black dehumanization and willful amnesia about the cost of racial slavery in the past and present, and utilized labor, religious, educational, artistic, civic, agricultural, and social tools

to organize, cajole, threaten, harass, and force a national policy and political epiphany around Black citizenship and dignity. Cold War liberalism jailed, incarcerated, deported, bankrupted, and murdered and scapegoated these heroes. So by the time we get to the more familiar

cast of church leaders, those who Malcolm X accused to being too busy singing when they should have been swinging, we have obscured so much of this larger history. We do this to our detriment becoming doomed to repeating the same mistakes, with increasingly disastrous results.