Demise of the Second Reconstruction

Decline of the Second Reconstruction
The Second Reconstruction is broadly defined as the time period in America after the passing of the Civil rights act of 1964, which brought about the necessity for an efficient transition into racial and sociopolitical equality. During the following years this was not achieved and several movements were constituted that attempted to bring this wish into reality through enthusiastic albeit unsuccessful political, social and cultural actions.
The following is a chronological narrative and sociopolitical analysis of those attempts.
Prelude: Nixon Administration and the Suppression of a Revolution
In the late1960’s American politics were shifting at a National level with liberalism being less supported as its politics were perceived as flawed, both by people on the left who thought that liberalism was not as effective as more radical political enterprises and by conservatives who believed that liberal politics were ostensibly crippling the American economy.
This political shift was materialized with the advent of the Southern Strategy in which Democrat president Lyndon Johnson’s support of Civil Rights harmed his political power in the South, Nixon and the republican party picked up on these formerly blue states and promoted conservative politics in order to gain a larger voter representation. Nixon was elected in a year drenched in social and political unrest as race riots occurred in 118 U.S cities at the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s murder, as well as overall American bitterness due to the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and the extensive student-led activist opposition to the Vietnam War.
The late 1960’s also saw the advent of several movements promoting Black N...

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...which greatly affected minorities including African-Americans families who grew in poverty line from 1.3 million to 1.5 million. Moreover, the Reagan administration spent the historically largest amount of the national budget on Military forces seen at that time.
It had all taken a severe turn towards the far right, and the general American population allowed for the vast sacrifice of social reform to promote relatively stable economic growth. Throughout the process of attempting to achieve these goals the battle for racial equality was continuously lost and left with it a legacy of social sentiment that would manifest itself through several socio-cultural movements in the forthcoming years.

Works Cited:
Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.