Speaking to the American Anti-Slavery Society in late 1863, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared, “The day that shall see Jeff. Davis fling down his Montgomery Constitution, and call home his Generals, will be the most trying day to the virtue of this people that this country has ever seen.” That trial, of course, would last far longer than a day. Among Union loyalists, a working consensus in opposition to slavery had solidified by the time Douglass spoke those words, but no such consensus was in sight regarding what should follow emancipation. Therein lay the great difficulty. For Douglass as for many of his fellow abolitionists and radical Republicans, the grand desideratum was “one glorious homogeneous people” in America—“one nation, one country, one citizenship, and one law for all.” For many others, however, the position taken by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison remained persuasive: abolition was a moral and practical imperative, but “incorporation” of those it would liberate was unacceptable. Support for slavery may have been largely sectional, but as the presence of various forms of antiblack laws throughout most northern states indicated, hostility to an interracially integrated America was powerful throughout the country. And yet, well before emancipation, it had become clear that the eminent Virginians’ preferred solution—the “colonization” of those formerly enslaved, by emigration or expatriation—itself faced insuperable obstacles. One way or another, “the sons of master and man,” as the activist-intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois would describe them, would have to live together in America. The documents in the present volume present an extended series of reflections by black and white Americans on whether and how these two racial groups could come to coexist and thrive as fellow citizens in this country. Picking up the story at the end of the Civil War, they tell of the long effort, stretching over 150 years and continuing through the present day, to bring an end to race-centric injustice in the United States. On that objective, framed in highly general terms, there is unanimity or near unanimity among the selections. Descending from that high level of generality, however, there are much variety and lively disagreement on more specific questions of ends and of means. What does justice mean in U.S. race relations? How might it best be achieved? Is justice sufficiently understood as the securing of equal civil and political rights, or does it require a more comprehensive antidiscrimination regime governing private as well as public actors? Should unjust discrimination be proscribed by law, or would it be better addressed by noncoercive appeals to public sentiment? How is such discrimination to be identified—by the malign intentions of actors or by the differential effects of their actions? Should efforts to achieve justice place their primary emphasis on the public airing of grievances or on self-help on the part of the aggrieved? Should their appeals remain strictly lawful and peaceful, or can they legitimately deploy extralegal or violent measures? Most fundamentally, should such efforts be directed toward the completion or the transformation of the American constitutional order? The figures represented in these documents answered these questions in various ways that were shaped, to a degree, by the issues specific to their own times. For present purposes we can locate them in three main periods, marked by overlapping clusters of particular issues: (1) Reconstruction to the advent of the Jim Crow era; (2) the Jim Crow era through the civil rights era, spanning roughly the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1960s; and (3) the post–civil rights era, from the late 1960s through the present day. At the dawn of Reconstruction, the overarching imperative was, as it would remain for the century that followed, the securing of equal rights under law, irrespective of race or color. The first federal Civil Rights Act, adopted by the Congress in 1866, gave concrete expression to this objective in providing that “citizens, of every race and color. . .shall have the same right, in every state and territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens” (see Strauder v. West Virginia). Advocates clearly understood, however, that civil rights for those newly emancipated would not be secure without the right to vote. Douglass declared in 1865, “I am for the ‘immediate, unconditional, and universal’ enfranchisement of the black man, in every state in the Union. Without this, his liberty is a mockery. . . .He is at the mercy of the mob, and has no means of protecting himself.” As Douglass’s remark indicates, blacks required protection not only against discriminatory governments but also against wrongs by their fellow citizens. The equal rights principle informing the 1866 Civil Rights Act forbids governments from favoring or disfavoring anyone based on race in the recognizing and securing of basic rights, but it does not necessarily forbid private parties from making such discriminations. To require, for instance, that all citizens be accorded the same rights of contract may be understood as according whites and blacks alike, acting in private capacities, the right to discriminate against each other based on race if they so choose. In part pursuant to this consideration, Congress moved beyond the equal rights principle. A more encompassing antidiscrimination principle informed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which entitled all persons, irrespective of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the “full and equal enjoyment” of certain privately owned public accommodations; and it imposed criminal penalties on violators. The constitutionality of the law was controversial from the outset, and the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated it in 1883 (See Elliot and Civil Rights Cases). But the antidiscrimination principle was reenacted into law in a far more ambitious version in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Advocates for the freed people agreed broadly on two further requisites for their security and happiness, although here, too, sharp controversies arose over some particulars. All agreed on the needs for education and material independence. For W. E. B. Du Bois and his colleagues in the Niagara movement (1905–10), an organization led by Du Bois that called for civil and social rights for African Americans, there could be no economic security absent political power, and political power could be achieved only through public agitation by members of an educated elite. Because the right of speech in this view was the key to securing all other rights, the primary need was the formation of a liberally educated elite class, both to exemplify blacks’ capabilities and to articulate their rights and grievances in the public square (See The Souls of Black Folk and “An Address to the Country“; see also A Voice from the South). Booker T. Washington, on the other hand, believed that political power would be the effect, rather than the cause, of economic power. In a post-Reconstruction climate of intense racial violence and intimidation in the Deep South, Washington maintained that a campaign to propagate protest speech would be self-destructive; the key to securing other rights was first and foremost the property right. Education, therefore, should first cultivate vocational competence and material independence among the mass of black laborers (See “Atlanta Exposition Address” and “My View of Segregation Laws“). The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) opened a new chapter in the history of U.S. race relations, lending constitutional authority to the regime of state-sanctioned racial segregation and discrimination, commonly known as “Jim Crow,” in the post-Civil War South. But that authority would prove ephemeral. As the twentieth century proceeded, challenges to that regime gathered force, employing older and newer strategies of opposition. Various developments made societal conditions ripe for those challenges. In the early decades of the twentieth century, persisting injustices in southern states and increased employment opportunities in northern states brought about a large-scale migration of blacks from the South to the North, resulting in gradual increases in blacks’ political and economic power. Blacks’ service in the two world wars lent additional strength to their claims to equal rights, and the nature of the enemy in World War II clarified for many Americans the odiousness of ideologies of racial supremacy. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Harlem Renaissance, an effusion of artistic achievement among blacks, along with inspiring victories over German opponents by sprinter Jesse Owens and boxer Joe Louis, brought elevated cultural recognition and confidence to black Americans. This was the context in which the successor to the Niagara movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), waged a sustained and highly successful campaign of courtroom challenges, culminating in landmark victories in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Loving v. Virginia (1967). Challenges to the Jim Crow regime came also from outside the courtroom, and involved a broader range of issues than state-sanctioned segregation. Employment opportunity became an increasing matter of concern, along with fair treatment in public accommodations and, above all, voting rights. But the deeper issue was the reform of public sentiment that would be required to secure the gains achieved through judicial, administrative, and legislative channels, and the campaign to achieve that reform brought forth new organizations and new forms of activism. Thus arose the momentous civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, whose early hallmark was the practice of nonviolent protest, including mass demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience (See Rustin, Randolph, and SNCC). The public attention generated by nonviolent demonstrations played a major part in the achievement of the movement’s greatest legislative successes, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (See Johnson). Yet not all of those sympathetic to the cause were persuaded of the wisdom of nonviolent direct action. For some, the enlisting of large numbers to participate in street protests, even with leaders preaching the discipline of nonviolence, carried an unacceptable risk of violence and disorder. In this view, legitimate and prudently crafted protest must remain strictly within the bounds of law and established institutional channels (See Jackson). For other critics, however, nonviolent direct action was both undignified and ineffective—undignified because it signified weakness and passivity rather than strength, and ineffective because it focused on issues of segregation and access, and failed to address the problem of poverty and the related concerns of northern urban ghetto inhabitants. Increasingly alienated by the failure, as they saw it, of the mainstream movement and the country as a whole to address these problems, this radical faction of critics, inspired by Malcolm X, took positions that linked black nationalism with revolutionary socialism (See Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and Carmichael). Partly in response to its radical critics, the mainstream of the civil rights movement, led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., itself became increasingly radicalized after 1965. This increasing radicalism, a response also to repeated incidents of pro-segregation violence and roughly coincident with the outbreak of widespread rioting in America’s cities, brought an end to the movement in the late 1960s. But it also set the stage for the post–civil rights era, in which the major economic and cultural elements of the movement’s radical turn in the mid-1960s, with some significant modifications, have moved into what is now the mainstream of racial justice advocacy in America. A fundamental feature of this new mainstream is an expanded conception of racial discrimination increasingly defined in terms of socioeconomic disparities between racial groups rather than by the intentions of discriminatory actors. The origins of this idea trace to the 1960s, when the Moynihan report and the Kerner Commission report explained family dissolution and urban rioting, respectively, as effects of chronic material deprivation, and civil rights leaders, including King and Bayard Rustin, agreed (See Moynihan and “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders“). To quell the disorders, in this view, it would not suffice simply to replace the old order of intentional discrimination with a new, present- and future-oriented system of race-neutral meritocracy. “Equal opportunity is. . . not enough,” President Lyndon Johnson insisted. The objective is “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Disparities in socioeconomic outcomes between blacks and whites as racial groups would themselves constitute racial injustice. Black Power authors Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton saw the implication clearly, characterizing racism no longer as a personal, moral vice but instead as institutional and systemic. This outcomes-oriented understanding of justice yields a seeming paradox: Discrimination by race comes to seem necessary to overcome discrimination by race. To remediate, in other words, the persisting effects of unjust racial discrimination in the past, compensatory forms of racial discrimination in the form of preferential race classifications are thought to be required in the present. This argument may seem forceful when quick results are desired, as they were with special urgency amid the contagion of civil disorders in the late 1960s. But beyond the heated environment of those years, the expansive notion of racial discrimination, entailing the use of redistributive race classifications as remedies, has received, with some modifications, judicial warrant from the Supreme Court in a series of rulings (See Griggs v. Duke Power Company and Grutter v. Bollinger). Beyond its socioeconomic import, the institutionalizing of race classifications in the hope of equalizing outcomes between historically favored and disfavored racial groups also holds profound cultural significance. To inscribe such classifications into law and policy is inevitably to encourage citizens to think of themselves, and of their claims on society, in racialized terms, and thus to think of their constitutional republic as a confederation of racial identity groups competing with one another for socioeconomic goods. Further, as the institutionalizing of race consciousness signifies a societal recognition of historical grievances, it creates a model for other groups to seek redress for their own identity-based grievances. On this logic the “Black Power” vision of Carmichael and Hamilton evolved into the multiculturalist “Rainbow Coalition” of aggrieved identity groups envisioned by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, with both visions opposed to the republic of one unified people under one law that Frederick Douglass saw as America’s mission and destiny. Coming to the present day, we close with a dispiriting observation. A half century after the country seemed on the brink of final victory in the long struggle for justice in race relations, and even after the election of the first African American U.S. president (See Obama), our divisions over issues of race and identity are as deep, considered at the level of first principles, as they have ever been—and this despite the fact that the main contestants in today’s controversies present themselves as adversaries of the racism practiced in the slavery and Jim Crow eras. Post–civil rights era divisions have come to this point because persisting socioeconomic disparities across the color line, judged by reference to the outcomes-based conception of racial justice and injustice, have fostered among one faction of self-professed antiracists a deepening sense of the fundamental illegitimacy of the U.S. political and constitutional order. Civil rights era hero and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall rendered a partial endorsement of this position in his speech on the Constitution’s bicentennial anniversary. A fuller, though still somewhat conflicted, endorsement appears in Nikole Hannah-Jones’ lead essay to the 1619 Project, while the Black Lives Matter leadership, reprising much of the spirit of the Black Panther Party, provides the most radical and uncompromising statement (See Marshall, Black Lives Matter, and Nikole Hannah-Jones). Against these lately ascendant charges of systemic illegitimacy, dissenters have mounted a renewed defense of what in earlier eras were mainstream positions of racial justice advocacy (See Thomas, Grutter v. Bollinger [Justice Thomas dissenting opinion], and Woodson). As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and longtime community-uplift activist Robert Woodson see things, the path of genuine progress lies in a strict adherence to the principle of equal treatment under color-blind or race-neutral laws, and in the teaching of black American history, consonant with all U.S. history, as a story of self-improvement and the overcoming of differences rather than one centered on intergroup oppression and antagonism. In their long struggle for liberty and justice for all in America, black Americans and their advocates have frequently and understandably engaged in talk of revolution. It is vital to bear in mind, however, that such talk encompasses two divergent ideas: revolution conceived as an act of completion, and revolution conceived as an act of radical transformation. Does America’s achievement of justice in the matter of race require the perfection of the Founders’ revolutionary republic, or its rejection and replacement? In the designation of our presently contending parties by the years 1619 and 1776, we see a clarification of the fundamental alternatives.