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    In 'Stony The Road,' Henry Louis Gates Jr. Looks At The Period After Reconstruction

    In his new book, the literary scholar presents an absorbing, necessary look at the "Redemption" era, in which the hard-fought gains of African-Americans were rolled back by embittered Southern whites.
    by Michael Schaub Apr 03, 2019 3 minutes
    Stony the Road, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

    American history, as it exists in the popular imagination, has often tended toward the self-congratulatory.

    Events of the past are frequently filtered through a majority lens, focusing on the perceived heroics of, for example, white abolitionists and civil rights activists. To hear some tell it, the civil rights struggle of the 1960s ended when President Lyndon B. Johnson, having indulgently listened to Martin Luther King Jr., signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, after which racism was solved and everything was better forever.

    It's for this reason, Redemption was "when the gains of Reconstruction were systematically erased and the country witnessed the rise of a white supremacist ideology that, we might say, went rogue, an ideology that would long outlast the circumstances of its origin."

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