 The Civil Rights Movement sought to redeem the broken promise of free and equal citizenship embodied in the Reconstruction amendments. Significant steps had been taken toward fulfilling that promise during the decade that followed the end of the war. However, violent white resistance across the former Confederacy and a fading commitment to the promise among Northern whites led to the demise of Reconstruction and the rapid consolidation of a new form of racial subjugation. As W.E.B. Du Bois poetically put the matter: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery” (1935/1992: 30).