The current moment: Ongoing attacks on democratic norms pale in comparison with previous era, author contends

Jere Nash, whose new book focuses on Reconstruction, says it’s been worse

Though many Americans see the Trump administration’s flouting of democratic norms and constitutional protections as unprecedented, Jere Nash, author of the new book Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1862-1877, has some interesting news from the long ago.

“Even for white folks but certainly for Black folks and immigrants, it’s been worse,” Nash said before a recent signing at Jackson’s Lemuria bookstore. “We’ve always been at war with each other. None of this is new.”

Nash’s position is that the benchmarks for voter suppression and the trampling of constitutional protections came during the Reconstruction era, and that the repercussions continued for decades after.

During the Jim Crow era, which followed post-Civil War Reconstruction and lasted nearly a century, Black citizens in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South essentially lived under an authoritarian regime, having emerged from enslavement to experience a brief flourish of political power that was ultimately taken away. In his book, published by University Press of Mississippi, Nash makes the case that what defined the Reconstruction era was the question of what freedom—the hallmark of America’s democratic system—actually means.

“In mid-1865, four million Americans all of a sudden gained their freedom,” Nash said. “They’d been enslaved their entire lives, and it was the first time in the country’s history that the country had to grapple with what does it mean to be free.” That debate has shaped U.S. history for 150 years and, “Practically every immigrant is grappling with that right now,” Nash said, adding, “Blacks, women, Native Americans, Americans of Japanese and Chinese descent, have had it worse.”

During Reconstruction, the electorate was extremely polarized, and even Americans in the North were conflicted about Black suffrage. After a comparatively brief rule by Black and allied white elected officials, the old guard managed to reclaim power through nefarious means, including paralegal violence and election fraud, yet even that was not to be a complete aberration, Nash argues.

In the decades after Reconstruction, Americans were subject to mass arrests and deportation for their political views and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served during the Great Depression and World War II, positioned himself as a champion of freedom yet oversaw the internment of Japanese Americans and the deportation of Mexican Americans and declined to support an anti-lynching law for fear it would alienate white southern Democrats. “For anybody who doesn’t look like you and me [i.e., white], it’s been fragile for 200 years,” Nash said.

Nash, a former political consultant and staffer for former Democratic Gov. Ray Mabus, coauthored two previous books with Republican politico Andy Taggart: Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2008 and Mississippi Fried Politics: Tall Tales from the Back Rooms. His new book was an outgrowth of his interest in understanding how the pivotal Reconstruction era put Mississippi on the cutting edge of America’s evolving democracy.

During Reconstruction, Nash said, “Mississippi was at the forefront. It was first state to hold a constitutional convention after the war and the first state to hold a legislative session after the war.” In his book, he writes that the white backlash during Reconstruction was based on the premise that although Blacks were no longer enslaved, they had no right to be their own masters. He quotes journalist Whitelaw Reid, who spent the year 1865 touring the South and wrote that, “More or less, the same feeling had been apparent in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, but it was in Mississippi that I found its fullest and freest expression.”

One of the key takeaways of his research, Nash said, is that, “In Mississippi, Black men and women pretty quickly came to the conclusion that to sustain their freedom they needed the right to vote, to be educated and to own land.” None of those rights would come easily.

Another takeaway is that despite the attention focused on white suppression of the Black vote through violence, the main weapon was election fraud. In the course of his research, Nash parsed period voter records and found that in many cases the tallies exceeded the total number of a county’s registered voters, as whites stuffed ballot boxes. In that way, he said, “White Democrats got control of the election machinery in key Black counties,” and so, retook control of state government. At the time, the national political parties’ roles were the opposite of today: Southern Democrats were primarily conservative whites and Republicans were newly enfranchised Blacks and allied whites.

In comparing Black voter suppression then and now, some historians suggest a significant difference is that the federal government previously provided a check on white supremacy. Again, Nash voices a different view. His conclusion is that even during Reconstruction the federal government was not a reliable protector.

“A key decision in 1875 was whether [President U.S.] Grant was going to send in soldiers to protect the Republican vote and he chose not to,” Nash said. “From 1875 until [President John F.] Kennedy sent the troops into Oxford in 1962, the federal government simply washed their hands and let it happen. The northern Democrats worked with southern Democrats to have majority control by leaving civil rights out of the equation.” That only began to change in the election of 1944, he said.

Among the mechanisms for post-Reconstruction authoritarian rule was the Black Code, which strictly limited freedmen’s rights.

“In the early months of Reconstruction, there was no consideration of allowing Black men to participate in elections,” Nash writes. The Black Code criminalized unemployment, “bad spending practices,” a Black person failing to financially support themselves or their families, and group assembly. Blacks who could not pay fines imposed by white judges could be hired out to anyone in the county to earn money to pay the fines.

The Black Code also required local officials to levy a $1 annual tax for every Black person between the ages of 18 and 60 to go to a pauper fund. Failure to pay the tax would lead to arrest and, again, being “hired out” to pay. Laws were passed to prohibit Blacks from riding in the same rail cars as whites; from owning or possessing guns or bowie knives; and from engaging in “seditious speeches, insulting gestures, or disturbance of the peace.”

The legislature meanwhile created a state militia of white men between the ages of 18 and 45 to maintain control.

The delegates to Mississippi’s 1865 constitutional convention were all white men, but that constitution was never approved, Nash writes. In 1867, Black voter registration far exceeded white – nearly 80,000, compared with almost 60,000—and during Reconstruction, Black majorities claimed elected offices. The constitution of 1869, which was approved by state voters, was written by Republicans of both races and included suffrage for Black men, prohibitions against discrimination in public transportation or the appropriation of funds, and the creation of public schools with no requirement that they be segregated. The constitution contained no prohibition on interracial marriage.

For the five years after the end of the Civil War, white Mississippians briefly lived under their own form of authoritarianism—military rule. But the end of military occupation coincided with the growth of white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, which moved into the state from Tennessee.

Voters in statewide and legislative elections in 1869 approved the new constitution and elected a slate of Black and white Republican officials, and the following year, with Mississippi still under U.S. military control, the legislature ratified the 14^th and 15^th amendments to the U.S. Constitution (which, respectively, granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States and granted equal protection under the law, and granted Black men the right to vote). The legislature also selected U.S. senators, pending readmission to the Union, which followed. Federal troops then left the state.

In response to rising KKK violence, Congress in 1870 passed measures providing for federal oversight of elections, followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1871, and vigilante violence in the state began to abate by 1873. However, a massacre of Black citizens in Warren County (which was not directly linked to the KKK), prompted Grant to send troops to restore order in 1874, and Black elected officials were returned to office, Nash writes. The following year, white vigilante violence occurred in Clinton and in Yazoo County, prompting Gov. Adelbert Ames, a former Union Army general, to ask for federal troops, which Grant this time did not provide. Soon after, white Democrats prevailed in legislative elections through voter intimidation and fraud, and elected a 2/3s majority in both the state House and Senate. The new legislature impeached Ames, who resigned, and two other Republican leaders. Ames was to be the state’s last Republican governor until 1992.

With white Democrats returned to power, the state imposed restrictions on Black voting, redrew congressional district lines in their favor, dramatically cut funding for public schools, and began creating a segregated society, first with the schools, then with rail cars and other business establishments. In 1890, a new state constitution included Black suffrage but with a $2 poll tax, an increase in residency requirements, and loss of voting rights following conviction for certain crimes that tended to be associated with Black people. The new constitution also removed prohibitions against discrimination on public transportation or appropriations, and placed limitations on interracial marriage. The Jim Crow era would last almost a century, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which are now imperiled.

In April 2025, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14281 which decreed that “the Attorney General shall initiate appropriate action to repeal or amend the implementing regulations for Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for all agencies to the extent they contemplate disparate-impact liability.” Disparate impact means that if a policy harms members of one group more than others and there is no good reason for the policy, it violates the law. Title VI prevents discrimination by programs and activities that receive federal funds.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court “appeared poised” to weaken a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by sharply limiting the ability of lawmakers to use race as a factor in drawing voting maps, which critics say could lead to widespread redistricting.

While conceding that it is impossible to say how far the current undermining of democratic norms will go, Nash holds to his basic contention: “We’re a long way from it being bad as it used to be.”

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Image: Cover of Nash book (via University Press of Mississippi)