Splendid Failure

"Since the civil rights era of the 1960s, revisionist historians have sympathized with the racial-justice motivations of the Radical Republican Reconstruction policies that followed the Civil War. But this emphasis on the Radicals' positive goals and accomplishments has obscured the role they played in the overthrow of their own program, which ultimately led to another century of inequality for Southern blacks. Michael W. Fitzgerald's new interpretation of this first freedom movement played into the hands of the South's white racist reactionaries."--BOOK JACKET.