👏🏻👏🏻 thank you for the education!

Learn about Reconstruction. You can’t understand the U.S. without knowing the truth about Reconstruction.

Sources on the CMUC:

www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/bl...

www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/...

www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropo...

Finally, the story of the CMUC is also a sobering reminder of the destructive force & resilience of white supremacy, which overcame the organization’s democracy work.

Because Black women always are.

The CMUC shows that Black people were co-creators of their own citizenship & freedom - refusing to wait for the official word before acting as citizens. And despite the fact that it was men who voted, I have no doubt that Black women were involved in the planning and preparation for CMUC activities.

Still, CMUC stands as a testament to Black political organizing, and to the vision of Black people to see freedom even before freedom was won. Their efforts confirm that preparation for power is a critical organizing strategy.

Litigation and activism to protect Black voting in the state continues.

11. This is the constitution that facilitated Virginia’s readmission to the Union, in an act passed by Congress and signed by President Grant in 1870. The terms of the Virginia Readmission Act were recently (2 wks ago) the basis of a suit challenging the state’s felony disenfranchisement law.

It would take Brown v. Board of Ed. & the Civil Rights Movement to re-plant the seeds of democracy in that state. In 1990 Virginia elected the first Black Governor in the country, Douglas Wilder.
Photos: teen civil rights activist Barbara Johns, civil rights atty Oliver Hill, & Governor Wilder.

With the destruction of Reconstruction in full swing in the 1880s, the state passed a series of laws limiting voting, and a new state constitution in 1902, which ultimately disenfranchised 90% of the state’s Black voters & plunged the state into white supremacist rule for decades.

10. Of the 104 delegates elected to the state constitutional convention, 24 were Black (depicted in the engraving below).Together these delegates were the framers of Virginia’s new constitution,which guaranteed voting rights, elected govt throughout the state, & a public school system for the state.

The world we live in of fast fashion, just-in-time manufacturing, big pharma, GMO crops, Tech Billionaires and endless franchise slop is all a result of the world IP built, and I prove it through close readings of about 25 different Disney movies. Yes, really!