Baseline

The America that's emerging? It's nothing new.

The image "The Union As It Was" was published in Harper's Weekly in 1874, and depicts a hooded Klansman and a White League member shaking hands over a shield showing a Black family caught between a burning schoolhouse and a lynching with the sentiment “Worse than Slavery” throughout – a stark allegory of post-Reconstruction racial terror. Emerging from the ashes of the Civil War, Reconstruction had kindled hope that America might at last live up to its ideals of equality.