US racial tensions reignite

The protests that followed the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, in police custody in Minneapolis this summer are the latest episode in long-standing tensions between black people and US law enforcers. From the civil rights movement’s earliest days, attempts by African-American people to exercise their rights have been met with tremendous hostility, both from sections of the white population and in the form of police brutality.

The US civil rights movement must be seen in the context of the Reconstruction era that followed the American Civil War. That was the process via which the federal government readmitted into the US the 11 Confederate states that had taken arms against the United States over the issue of slavery. After the Union victory in the Civil War, congress passed three crucial amendments to the US Constitution during Reconstruction: the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery; the 14th, which guaranteed national citizenship rights for African-American men and women; and the 15th, which extended suffrage to black men.

“Police brutality was front and centre as the repressive