In the 1880s and 1890s, a stream of Black Methodist and Baptist ministers pressed a desperate question: What would a new abolition be? Abolitionism and the Civil War had come and gone, Reconstruction had come and been forsaken, and a mania of racist terrorism descended on Black Americans. The U.S. imposed a racial caste system lacking any parallel in the post-slavery Americas. Lynching backstopped the Black Codes, the 14th and 15th Amendments were eviscerated in most of the South, and a post-Confederate grievance mythology about a Lost Cause grew into a civil religion.
Read more here: https://reflections.yale.edu/article/listening-heart-can-we-temper-polarization/darkly-radiant-vision-black-social-gospel
