From the outside, Black Lives Matter looked strong in the early 2020s. After its successful, massive protests against the killing of George Floyd, the organization remained supremely well funded, with tens of millions of dollars in the bank and control of the most recognized slogan in the Second Civil Rights Movement. The relative quiet from the group when a Black woman took a seat on the Supreme Court set off no alarms. The organization’s lack of attention to Congress passing historic anti-lynching legislation also went largely unremarked upon because the media expected protests, not lobbying, from BLM.
But behind that proud, business-as-usual face, Black Lives Matter was imploding. The organization was preoccupied with lawsuits coming from its own chapters and was spending its energy and time hiding from questions about how the tens of millions donated to the group had been spent.
Other negatives tore away at its heart as well.
Black Lives Matter had never effectively replaced its three founders. It never built a team of people, an institutional structure, to sustain its status as a leading actor in the Second Civil Rights Movement. Its failing in-house operations limited its work on creating allies. It certainly did not build lasting bridges to the Hispanic community, the country’s largest minority group. And at a time of a surge in Black immigration, Black Lives Matter never effectively welcomed immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America into the Second Civil Rights Movement. They missed another opportunity by not forming strategic alliances with established and larger women’s organizations, which could have bolstered their profile.
But among all the stumbles, the most troubling were the financial scandals. Critics who opposed Black Lives Matter’s racial justice agenda jumped on tax records that revealed an alarming sloppiness, if not corruption. By 2023, the organization had experienced a huge drop in donations. BLM took in nearly $100 million following the George Floyd protests; three years later, they could not even raise $9 million. Two thirds of their previous donations had already been spent on questionable expenses, including payments to friends and relatives of the group’s leaders.1
Conservative media outlets and websites feasted on the damaging news about Black Lives Matter. The organization settled into a defensive posture, keeping a low profile to avoid the frenzied attention to its troubled financial picture. Opinion polls showed that large percentages of Americans still approved of the Black Lives Matter movement and supported the racial justice appeals behind it. But the group’s potential to be a social justice leader was bleeding out, its muscle withering even as the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter remained popular.
Black Lives Matter’s public image of rising above politics to speak to injustice was also sinking, as a consequence of rising polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Polls showed more than 80 percent of Democrats approved of the organization and its goals, but more than 80 percent of Republicans opposed it. Across party lines there was one critical point of agreement—only 32 percent thought Black Lives Matter had been effective in improving the lives of Black Americans.2
There were even questions about Black Lives Matter’s impact in its principal area of focus: police violence against Black people. These concerns grew in 2023, when an unarmed Black man, Tyre Nichols, was brutally beaten to death by five Black police officers in Memphis. This high-profile killing in a majority-Black city demonstrated that the issue had not gone away. Patrisse Cullors, one of Black Lives Matter’s cofounders, called Nichols’s killing a “reminder that the people who hold the power have chosen not to wield it on behalf of Black life. They’ve chosen to side with violent police forces.”
Ten years after the organization first came on the scene, Cullors was full of regrets. She acknowledged that looking back on the birth of the group “feels like a painful reminder of what hasn’t changed.”3 Beginning with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in Trayvon Martin’s killing and continuing through George Floyd’s violent death, an unprecedented amount of money had flowed into Black Lives Matter. At the end of a decade of prosperity and media influence, Cullors now admitted she had been unprepared to handle the deluge of what she angrily, defensively, and rudely derided as “white guilt money.”4
The decline of Black Lives Matter had been evident over the preceding year. During the 2022 midterm election campaign, the organization was pushed to the fringe of the national debate about politics and even racial issues. Historical trends and polls suggested that the Democrats were likely to lose majority control of the House and Senate. But Black Lives Matter showed no interest in rising to the political challenge and coming to the rescue by working as part of the Democrats’ political coalition. This persistent lack of political engagement by Black Lives Matter spoke to the organization’s inability to grow and mature.
Black Lives Matter was further marginalized in June 2022, when the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutionally protected right to abortion access. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the nation’s highest court said that individual states now had the right to permit or outlaw the procedure as they chose. This upended nearly fifty years of American constitutional law.
Democrats immediately made protecting abortion rights their top issue in the coming elections. The outcry over loss of abortion rights overshadowed attention to issues of race and police violence, which had helped turn out the party’s base in 2020.
Intent on distracting women voters from the court’s decision to end abortion rights, the Republican Party launched a series of attacks on gay and transgender rights. They also started banning books that dealt with LGBTQ issues. These culture wars extended to Republican-led opposition to Covid mandates requiring masks or vaccinations. And the party plunged into conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election having been stolen from Donald Trump and Republicans, a claim for which no evidence was ever provided. The party’s talking points also included frequent mention of “Defund the Police” and sinister references to Black Lives Matter designed to trigger fear of crime spreading beyond Black neighborhoods to white business districts and suburbs.
Republican candidates also made a big deal of their opposition to affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion workplace training. These programs got hammered on the right for, as their opponents characterized it, making it harder for white students to gain admission to selective public high schools and prestigious colleges, and for making it harder for white workers to be hired and to compete for pay raises and promotion. Polls showed that a majority of Republicans agreed with the “replacement theory” assertion that Democrats, from Soros to Obama to Biden, intended to replace white people as the nation’s majority population with an influx of Latino and Asian immigrants as well as Blacks, all of whom have a history of voting for Democrats. Conservatives spoke about racial minorities undoing white American culture and traditions.
In this racially charged atmosphere, Black Lives Matter became a high-visibility scapegoat for the Republicans. Surveys by the Pew Research Center showed that while whites remained the majority in both political parties, in the 2022 election, 85 percent of Republican voters were white, whereas the white majority among Democrats was joined by a base of multiracial voters sympathetic to the ideas and racial conversations prompted by Black Lives Matter to win elections. Pew found that well over 60 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian voters were Democrats.5
But for Democrats courting the votes of white moderates, particularly in competitive states, the party’s connection to Black Lives Matter became a burden. Every Democratic candidate had to respond to Republicans tying them to the slogan “Defund the Police.” Repeating that phrase in white, suburban swing districts was a surefire way to stir anxiety about Democrats doing away with police. That fear was good for Republicans. None of it was good for the Democrats, or for Black Lives Matter, which did not respond to these attacks.
Additional Republican fearmongering centered on the claim that white children were being taught to be ashamed of being white. Republican candidates charged that schoolbooks were promoting the idea that every white child had responsibility for slavery and shared blame for “systemic racial discrimination” in present-day America. With Black Lives Matter protests fading from the streets, Republicans had an open road to change the subject of national media attention from police violence to Critical Race Theory and the idea that this radical ideology was infecting the country’s schools, culture, and corporations.
The race-centered culture wars took flight in Florida under its Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. Working with the Republican majority in the Florida state legislature, he passed the Stop WOKE Act in 2022, which explicitly banned workplace and classroom discussions about concepts that were characterized as “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” The legislation pushed back against what DeSantis termed “woke indoctrination” and Critical Race Theory.6
In reality, Critical Race Theory is a postgraduate-level concept and had never been a feature of American education in elementary or high schools. What began as a theory discussed in law schools about the widespread impact of “systemic racism” was rarely even taught in undergraduate courses, let alone to school-age children.
Meanwhile, the term “stay woke” was Black slang going back to the 1930s. It meant remaining “vigilant against the threat of racist violence.”7 Eighty years later, being “woke” gained new currency during the Ferguson protests and exploded as part of the national lexicon after the George Floyd protests. DeSantis’s “anti-woke” efforts reflected a broad conservative push against focusing on racial issues. The Florida governor began a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 by tapping into these culture war emotions to reach a national audience.
His efforts were shaped with the help of a right-wing provocateur named Christopher Rufo. An obscure documentary filmmaker, Rufo burst onto the scene in 2020 when he wrote an essay for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, claiming that Black Lives Matter undermined American culture by demonizing white people. He appeared on a Fox News program where he railed against Critical Race Theory, claiming that it “pervaded every aspect of the federal government,” as well as corporations, media, and academia.8
“This is an existential threat to the United States,” Rufo told a prime-time Fox audience. “And the bureaucracy, even under Trump, is being weaponized against core American values.” The next morning, Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, called Rufo to ask him to give the White House information about federal agencies that were using diversity programs that vilified white people. Three weeks later, the Trump administration suspended all diversity training across the government.9
In truth, The Wall Street Journal reported, the information that Rufo provided to the White House did not back up his claim that the federal government was making white people out to be demons.10
For years, Trump and DeSantis supporters had been looking for a way to counter the continued popularity of Black Lives Matter. Rufo made the connection, tying Critical Race Theory to Black Lives Matter, saying that the protest movement was a cover for peddling an insidious leftist ideology. “School districts across the country suddenly started adopting ‘equity statements,’ hiring ‘diversity and inclusion’ bureaucrats, and injecting heavily political content into the curriculum,” he wrote.
Rufo credited Trump’s work to stop diversity programs in the federal government as a first step in the movement against Critical Race Theory. It was also the “most successful counterattack against BLM as a political movement. We shifted the terrain and fought on a vector the Left could not successfully mobilize against,” he said.11
Rufo contrasted Black Lives Matter with the First Civil Rights Movement, which he said had championed freedom and equity. Now, he argued, Black Lives Matter and the Second Civil Rights Movement were advancing a Marxist political and economic agenda. They would destroy, he said, “the remaining structure of the Constitution.” He also critiqued Critical Race Theory as a backdoor effort to push the federal government to pay reparations to Blacks for slavery. He even proposed that it might be an effort to undo property rights if they proved harmful to minorities.
He charged that anyone raising concerns about Black Lives Matter’s progressive ideology was suddenly “getting mobbed on social media, fired from their jobs, or worse, they remained quiet” for fear of being accused of having unconscious bias or being called a racist. To his thinking, Black Lives Matter activists were using “cancel culture” to silence conservatives.12
Despite a lack of evidence that these accusations accurately reflected reality, Rufo’s theories were celebrated among conservatives for framing arguments against diversity and inclusion training. Rufo criticized the Walt Disney Company, the largest employer in the state of Florida, for promoting corporate diversity training. DeSantis picked up on Rufo’s campaign against Disney as he began his presidential campaign.
Rufo also urged the governor to dismantle diversity offices within state government and at state universities. DeSantis then put Rufo on the board of the state-funded New College, promising to transform it from a decidedly progressive college into an ultraconservative institution. “We are recapturing higher education,” Rufo tweeted after his appointment.13
Rufo’s work with DeSantis in Florida became a model for similar culture-war initiatives in other states with Republican governors or legislatures. At least a dozen states banned Critical Race Theory in public schools.
Rufo, DeSantis, and others in the conservative media aggressively asserted that white people were being demonized in classrooms by Critical Race Theory. They used that fear to justify bans on books that dealt with race, both in the classroom and in public libraries. Banned titles included the New York Times’s 1619 Project, the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. The censorship also extended to newer books that dealt with sexual confusion in adolescents, especially those exploring LGBTQ issues, such as Gender Queer, Flamer, and This Book Is Gay. In addition to the book bans, ten states passed laws that limited treatment for young people questioning their sexual and gender identities, especially transgender youth. They also banned trans girls from competing in girls’ sports and prohibited gender-neutral bathrooms.
Rufo’s work against Critical Race Theory prompted a group of conservative parents in Florida to take the fight to local school boards. Moms for Liberty, formed in Brevard County, began protesting mandates that children wear masks or receive the Covid vaccine. They saw vaccine mandates as a left-wing edict to control America’s children. More than one hundred chapters of Moms for Liberty quickly sprang up around the country. Florida activists Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich, and Bridget Ziegler described their new movement as “ready to fight those that stand in the way of liberty.”14 Ziegler openly credited Moms for Liberty as a new way to energize women to become Republican voters, and her husband, Christian Ziegler, later became head of the state Republican Party.
After several members of Ziegler’s group won school board elections in Sarasota, pictures appeared online showing Zeigler and a large group of parents with members of the Proud Boys flashing white supremacist hand gestures. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which listed Moms for Liberty as an extremist group, noted that its social media posts and programs were in line with conspiracy propaganda, specifically opposition to LGBTQ rights. SPLC reported that some of the group’s members had called law enforcement with the claim that children were being sexualized in school and were “pushing into the area of QAnon conspiracies of children being groomed by progressives.”15
Ziegler’s husband was forced to resign as chair of the Florida Republican Party after a woman charged him with rape. Those charges were later dropped, but it was revealed that he and his wife had engaged in a threesome involving another woman. The revelation was humiliating for Ziegler, who had hypocritically pushed “traditional values” and the anti-LGBTQ agenda on the school board and as a member of Moms for Liberty.16
Groups similar to Moms for Liberty sprang up in Virginia and helped propel the election of the Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin as governor in 2021. That summer, one person was arrested and another injured as right-wing activists turned a school board meeting into a brawl in suburban Loudon County. The activists were protesting accommodations for transgender students, but they principally decried the teaching of Critical Race Theory, even as the school board assured parents that no schools taught it.
Youngkin used the phrase “Parents Matter,” a takeoff on Black Lives Matter, as a loaded campaign slogan, pledging to “ban teaching critical race theory in our schools.” In a state that was evenly divided between the two parties, he rode a wave of local resentment aimed at school administration and teachers unions to a victory.17
Youngkin’s first act as governor was to issue an executive order banning Critical Race Theory. “Political indoctrination has no place in our classrooms,” he said. “Inherently divisive concepts, like Critical Race Theory and its progeny, instruct students to only view life through the lens of race and presume that some students are consciously or unconsciously racist, sexist, or oppressive, and that other students are victims.”18
Right-wing extremists continued to threaten school board members well beyond Florida and Virginia. Reuters reported that in 2022 there were more than 220 threats targeting thirty-three school board members across fifteen states.19 The Justice Department decried such intimidation of school board members, but the aggressive right-wing activism continued to spread. It was politically potent and led many Republican governors to follow DeSantis by pushing similar “anti-woke” legislation in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri. These developments led to a renewed fight over voting rights. White conservatives dominated politics in these mostly Southern states, which also had large Black populations. The anti–Critical Race Theory and anti-LGBTQ fights became part of the white conservative effort to hold on to political power in the face of a potential wave of Black votes against them.
In Washington, Biden’s signature voting rights bills remained stalled in Congress, where the threat of Republican filibusters in the Senate prevented any progress. Ten years after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, when the Court ruled that states with a history of discriminating against Black voters no longer needed federal approval under the Voting Rights Act to change their voting laws, even if those changes depressed minority voting, the Brennan Center for Justice reported that eleven states had enacted laws making it harder to vote. In contrast, thirteen states, led by Democrats, had expanded voting rights by extending days for voting and increasing the number of polling places.
As this tug-of-war took place among the states over access to the polls, a separate fight broke out after the 2020 U.S. Census as state legislatures drew new maps for congressional districts.
Alabama got the most national attention for its controversial redistricting plan. The state’s population was 27 percent Black, but the Republican state legislature drew a map where only one of the state’s seven congressional districts had a Black majority. Evan Milligan, the head of a new-generation coalition of civil rights groups called Alabama Forward, led a challenge to the map. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund litigated the case, Allen v. Milligan, all the way to the Supreme Court.
But this was not the First Civil Rights Movement pushing for racial integration. This was a new generation of racial strategists whose priority was to concentrate Black voters in congressional districts so they could elect Black officials. Integration was now on a back burner.
In a surprise 5–4 decision—a surprise given the Court’s conservative majority—the justices ruled that the remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act required Alabama’s legislature to stop splitting up Black populations across the state and to create a second Black-majority district.
The decision brought to light a stark division between the two Black justices. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the celebrated newcomer nominated by Biden, voted with the majority. She said during oral arguments that the Voting Rights Act was intended to make Black Americans “equal to white citizens.” But Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a heated dissent. He called the case a “disastrous misadventure” in pursuit of equal rights. Even though race was a protected class under the Voting Rights Act, Thomas argued that the “racial sorting” of voters was wrong. He viewed racial minorities as no different from any other minorities in American society, including those not protected by law, “from environmentalists in Alaska to Republicans in Massachusetts.”20
After the Court’s ruling, however, the Alabama legislature refused to fix its illegal congressional districts. Instead, the legislature created a second district that was just 40 percent Black, which was also ruled to be insufficient by an appeals court—a judgment later affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. This set up a standoff between the Alabama legislature and the Supreme Court, which resulted in a second 48 percent Black district. The fight was similar to the “Massive Resistance” of the 1950s, when Southern states (like Alabama) refused to go along with school integration. Back then, white legislators also refused to comply with a Supreme Court ruling. In those cases, Alabama was forced to finally integrate its schools.
The division on the Court over voting rights was a reminder of the unfulfilled goals of the First Civil Rights Movement. And the debate had little to do with the central actors in the Second Civil Rights Movement, President Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter. Things would come to a head in the Supreme Court’s decision to revisit its jurisprudence on affirmative action in the 2022–23 term.
The concept of affirmative action was more than sixty years old, having been established in the first days of the Kennedy administration. Soon after taking office, John F. Kennedy signed an executive order calling on the federal government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”21 Kennedy’s order did not mandate any requirements or goals for hiring by the federal government or private employers. Over the next decade, affirmative action was expanded under Democratic president Lyndon Johnson and Republican president Richard Nixon.
But affirmative action was unpopular with the public, despite gaining bipartisan support for passage in Congress and from presidents of both parties. Gallup polling in the 1970s showed only 10 percent of Americans agreed with the notion of giving “preferential treatment in getting jobs and places in college.”22 Most said that test scores and past accomplishments should be the basis for admission or hiring, not quotas or purely racial preferences designed to correct past discrimination. Conservatives argued that affirmative action broke with the central tenet of American individual rights, as stated in the Declaration of Independence’s claim that all men are created equal.
The clash of ideals led to an early legal test when a white engineer and former Marine, Allan Bakke, applied to the medical school at the University of California, Davis, but was turned down. He argued that he had been rejected because of a university policy to hold sixteen seats at the medical school for Black applicants, and he sued to be admitted.
In 1978, in a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court found that the university’s racial quotas were unconstitutional. The only Black justice on the court, Thurgood Marshall, voted in favor of affirmative action as a necessary corrective for past discrimination. In a memo to the other justices, he wrote: “It must be remembered that during most of the past 200 years, the Constitution as interpreted by this Court did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro. Now when the state acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier.”23
While Marshall did not carry the day on the idea of legalizing the use of quotas, he was able to convince a majority to agree that the race of applicants could be considered as a compelling interest, such as a university’s desire to have a diverse student body. The court endorsed Marshall’s view that preparing top students to succeed in an increasingly diverse country required a consideration of race.
The practice of including race as a factor in university admissions held for forty-five years, until two cases came before the Supreme Court for oral argument in the fall of 2022. The cases were brought by conservative activists who argued that affirmative action plans at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University discriminated against Asian and white students. The ruling, issued on June 29, 2023, overturned nearly a half century of decisions allowing affirmative action and signaled a further consolidation of the power of the new conservative majority on the court.
A key precedent used by the justices in outlawing affirmative action was the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger. In that decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that “25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”24 O’Connor’s decision was certainly reflected in terms of public opinion. Just as polling had found in the 1970s, a majority of Americans remained strongly opposed to affirmative action for university admissions, with 69 percent saying that they did not agree with schools using race as a factor. However, Americans showed much more support for general programs to help minorities, such as internships and apprenticeships, with 49 percent giving their approval.25
The two Black justices, who had split on the Alabama voter redistricting case, once again were at odds. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the majority wanted to look away from “the elephant in the room—the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our Nation’s full potential.” As Marshall had argued four decades earlier, Jackson felt that having diverse college campus populations carried “universal benefits” for the country in helping promote racial progress. Both she and Justice Clarence Thomas had been beneficiaries of affirmative action at Ivy League law schools.
But Thomas viewed affirmative action as a burden for its Black beneficiaries, saying that it was a stigma because whites assumed he was less intelligent or capable. Jackson, on the other hand, thought it was a plus in a society burdened with a long history of racial bias. She wrote that Thomas’s thinking, shared by the conservative majority, “blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count…. Our country has never been colorblind.” Interestingly, though the lawsuit was about white and Asian students claiming discrimination, Justice Jackson only refers to “Asians” twice in her dissent. In her references to race, she mentioned Black thirty-six times, indicating her focus on combating the historic as well as ongoing discrimination against Black students.26
Their argument over America’s tortured history of race became personal. For the first time in his thirty-two-year career, Thomas read his decision from the bench. “Treating anyone differently based on skin color is oppression,” he told his fellow justices, as well as the rows of the packed onlookers in the chamber.
His opinion called out Justice Jackson directly: “As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today.” He added: “Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims. Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me.”
Thomas’s disdain continued, as he accused Jackson of putting Black people in a “seemingly perpetual inferior caste.”
Without calling out Thomas in the same bitter tone, Jackson wrote in a footnote that he was the one who was lost, trapped in “an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my [argument]… that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences.”27
The right-wing decision, though unwelcome, did produce a moment of unity across the generations of civil rights leaders. Organizations with their origins in the First Civil Rights Movement were quick to criticize the decision. Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, called it the work of an “extremist minority.” He said that “in a society still scarred by the wounds of racial disparities, the Supreme Court has displayed a willful ignorance of our reality.”28
The Urban League, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the National Action Network also denounced the ruling, and they were joined by newer voices from the Second Civil Rights Movement. Beyond the Black community, UnidosUS, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund came together to call the decision a “distressing reminder of the uphill battle we continue to face in dismantling systemic racism.”29
Notably absent, though, was Black Lives Matter, which had nothing to say on the decision. This had become an unyielding pattern. Beyond police violence, Black Lives Matter never successfully addressed the multiple political and legal issues that confronted minorities in America. Black Lives Matter never rose to the fight as the courts stripped away affirmative action programs, missing in action just as it had been on the issues of redistricting and voter suppression.
Other new organizations in the Second Civil Rights Movement faced similar troubles. The group Color of Change initially had great success in calling attention to right-wing media that promoted negative racial stereotypes through “reality” crime shows like Cops. It also had success in calling corporations to account for funding far-right organizations that promoted voter suppression and other racially regressive policies at the state and local level. But it never lived up to its promise to harness the online activism of a new generation seeking to force greater social and political change on major racial issues. Like Black Lives Matter, it suffered from internal dissension ranging from charges of poor financial controls to bullying and even discrimination against women. But unlike Black Lives Matter, this group was more open in acknowledging its problems. “COC’s startup culture and systems didn’t always meet the demands of the large organization,” wrote members of the organization’s board in 2023.30
There were disappointments among other groups in the Second Civil Rights Movement as well.
For example, the Center for Antiracist Research, a prominent academic institution founded at Boston University by the best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi, had been established with as much as an estimated $50 million in funding in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Its stated goal was to “understand, explain and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice.”31 Yet three years later, the center made front-page headlines for massive staff cuts and for eliminating most of its programs. The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg observed that there were “considerable questions about what’s been accomplished with all that money.”32 There were reports circulated of bickering among academics, many of them Black, who questioned Kendi’s leadership. The center’s effectiveness was also drowned out by a vagueness in its mission, which never resulted in new academic fields of study on race and only limited research.
Even on the political level, progressive members of Congress, like those in the Squad, could not counter the power and visibility of conservative actors in Washington. They were unable to overcome Senate opposition to pass voting rights legislation or to counter voter suppression efforts. Even after the massive George Floyd protests generated tremendous public support, they were unable to enact police reform, which also hit a roadblock in the Senate. They found time to hold several hearings on establishing a commission to examine whether reparations should be paid to Black Americans to compensate for damage done by slavery, but this effort also led nowhere. Their one legislative victory was the anti-lynching law—a big win after 120 years of effort, but one that felt like leftover work from the First Civil Rights Movement.
Meanwhile, conservatives continued to take pleasure in any missteps made by civil rights groups, loudly countering the argument that the George Floyd protests had brought about a time of racial reckoning. When news broke of the management and financial troubles at the Center for Antiracist Research, Christopher Rufo gleefully tweeted: “It’s time for a full investigation into the center’s finances. What happened to the $30 million it received?”33
On the level of presidential politics, Donald Trump remained the dominant actor among Republicans, and he continued to foment white racial grievance. He was leading the party toward more extreme stances and policies on subjects ranging from race to immigration to gender identity. And his dominance of right-wing media guaranteed support for his lies and appeals to racial division.
This was the landscape as the country moved toward the pivotal 2024 presidential election. Overcoming it was part of the unfinished challenges facing the Second Civil Rights Movement: instituting police reform, confronting voter suppression, and promoting diversity and equity initiatives in an era when affirmative action is no longer constitutional. (Although as Michelle Obama noted at the 2024 DNC, “the affirmative action of generational wealth,” which primarily benefits white Americans, remains fully intact.)
Though the Second Civil Rights Movement was far from completing its agenda, it had still achieved remarkable success. In generational terms, it caused a wave of awareness of ongoing racial inequality to flow through the nation’s cultural and social life, starting with Barack Obama’s election and growing with the rise of Black Lives Matter. The existence of a more diverse America made the historic fight all the more urgent.
The aging white majority of the country struggled with these major cultural changes. White people, especially less educated, older, and more rural white people, were unable or unwilling to adjust to the new reality of an America that included more people with accented voices, some not even speaking English. There was a new prominence for Black voices, previously muted, calling attention to racial disparities in police violence and other racial injustice, and being celebrated for doing so.
In September 2023, on the sixtieth anniversary of the segregationist bombing that killed four Black girls at a church in Birmingham, Alabama, a leading light of the Second Civil Rights Movement was the featured speaker at a memorial service. “Our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice, but can we really say that we are not confronting those same evils now?” asked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “We have to own even the darkest parts of our past, understand them, and vow never to repeat them.”
At a time when books on Black history were being banned, Justice Jackson made the case for the value of history, no matter how painful, as necessary for the nation’s future success.
“Atrocities like the one we are memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive, but I also know that it is dangerous to forget them,” the justice said. “We cannot forget because the uncomfortable lessons are often the ones that teach us the most about ourselves…. We cannot learn from past mistakes we do not know exist.”
Justice Jackson’s remarks included a reference to maintaining the ability to “mark forward progress” on civil rights. She was speaking at the site of a racist attack that took place in 1963, almost one hundred years after the end of the Civil War. She was also speaking more than four hundred years after African slaves first came to the American colonies.34
Over those centuries, progress on race relations had been a jagged line of ups and downs, from slavery to Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the First Civil Rights Movement, and on to the first Black president and the struggles of today. But through it all, the one constant was action, people standing up for what was right.
As Frederick Douglass said before the Civil War, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”35 The Second Civil Rights Movement made that demand. From Obama’s presidency to the Black Lives Matter protests, the Second Civil Rights Movement’s legacy is having changed the conversation about race in America and forced more accountability for racist behavior and policy.
It will eventually make way for a Third Civil Rights Movement. That Third Movement will face its own unique cultural, demographic, and political challenges, another phase in history as it demands change to fulfill the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—for all Americans.