The Fire This Time

People might have assumed the Civil Rights era put an end to pervasive and institutional racism, but events such as the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown suggest this is not the case. Wilkerson describes the “continuing feedback loop” (59) that sees progress for civil rights, followed by a great downtrend, and repetition of these trends. The “Nadir” (59) describes a precipitous downtrend after the progress of post-Civil War, post-slavery Reconstruction in the United States. This Nadir saw the enactment of Jim Crow laws and the lynching of African Americans during the decades following Reconstruction. 

Black Americans reacted to Jim Crow by fleeing the South in the Great Migration, but the North also treated them with institutional resistance via “redlining, overpolicing, hyper-segregation, the seeds of the disparities we see today” (60). In these and other movements, Wilkerson observes a downtrend in the civil rights loop. Incidents of police violence against unarmed black people now outnumber lynchings during Jim Crow. The black community must assess this long series of injustices to face the future with courage, compassion, and endurance.