From The 1619 Project:
Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first Black man elected
to the U.S. Senate in 1870. He and Blanche Bruce, elected four years later, would go from being the first Black men elected to the last for nearly a hundred years until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts in 1967.
More than 600 Black men served in Southern state legislatures, hundreds more in local positions. Black officials joined with white Republicans some of whom came down from the North and believed that abolition would also expand the rights of white Americans, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass equitable tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in public transportation, accommodations, and housing.
...their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of American institutions, the public school. Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education. But newly freed Black people...were desperate for an education...So Black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state-fuinded system of schools...five years into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the right to a public education for all children into its constitution. In some states, like Louisiana and South Carolina, small numbers of Black and white children, briefly, attended schools together. In 1873 the University of South Carolina became the only state-sponsored college in the South to fully integrate, becoming majority Black -- just like the state itself -- by 1876. (When white former Confederates regained power a year later, they closed the university. After three years, they reopened it as an all-white institution...it would remain that way until a court-ordered desegregation in 1963.)
For a fleeting moment known as Reconstruction...we could birth the multiracial democracy that Black Americans envisioned, even if our founding fathers did not... gains were met with white violence... wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even... violent overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this violent recalcitrance, the federal government once again settled on black people as the problem and decided that for unity's sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrts that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull remaining federal troops from the South. With troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction... this period between the 1880's and the early 20th Century became known as the second slavery of the Great Nadir...Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century... 'It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes....'"
Democracy will not enforce itself against racists.
When Critical Race Theory shows that every single institution built in this nation was premised on racism, that claim is proven by The 1619 Project's (2021) well-sourced book.
The precedence of unenforced constitutional protections began long before Roe v Wade. If we cower before the filibuster, the constitution will stay unenforced.
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