Thread by @LarryGlickman

The Voting Rights Act was called “An act to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.” Those who passed Civil Rights laws in the 1960s saw them not as “upending” the Constitution (as Andrew Sullivan has it) but as fulfilling it,as amended during the Reconstruction era

See Eric Foner’s recent book on the Reconstruction amendments.
amazon.com/Second-Foundin…

BTW, @KevinMKruse and @KevinLevin made these points in September before the Andrew Sullivan article or the Caldwell book appeared. They seem particularly relevant in response to Sullivan's framing, which presumably is also Caldwell's.

https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1174733698010374144

@KevinMKruse @KevinLevin And, of course, C. Vann Woodward spoke of the nascent Civil Rights movements as a "Second Reconstruction."
amazon.com/Strange-Career…

@KevinMKruse @KevinLevin Here's the great historian, John Hope Franklin, in 1964 speaking of the "100-year Civil Rights struggle since the Civil War." No "upending," contra Sullivan, but finally fulfilling the Reconstruction Amendments.
newspapers.com/clip/43533781/

@KevinMKruse @KevinLevin Important to point out that opponents of the Civil Rights movement also made the connection (the "exact parallel," as Percy Greene, the editor of the Mississippi Advocate, pointed out in this piece) to Reconstruction.
newspapers.com/clip/43537780/