A lithograph from New York's famous Currier and Ives printing house captures the moment.

The portraits of the seven men align in two rows like a sports team.

In their plain black frock coats, bow ties, splendid facial hair

trimmed in a variety of manly Victorian styles, they emanate power and

propriety. The image, from 1872, commemorates the first African Americans

in Congress. All seven were Southerners. All Republicans. Five were former slaves.

Farthest to the left is Hiram Revels.

He was the senator from Mississippi. The office Jeffson Davis had quit

to become president of the Confederacy. It was a second revolution.

When the abolitionist Frederick Douglas saw the print, he was moved by how extraordinary it was

to see a black man portrayed as, quote, something other than a monkey.

The image defines the period of reconstruction, America's, the world's, first experiment with interracial democracy.

The apex of black representation came in 1875

when Blanch Bruce, an ex-slave turned plantationation owner joined rebels in the Senate, but the experiment was extinguished barely a year later.

The next time two elected African Americans took their seats in the Senate. It was 2013. This is checks and

balance.

I'm John Prido, the economist's US editor. Each week we take one big theme shaping American politics and explore it in depth.

Today. What does reconstruction reveal about race in 2020? After the defeat of the Confederacy, the end of slavery, 1865, the period known as

reconstruction was a chance to create a multiracial democracy

and for America to live up to the promise made in its founding documents.

It ended in failure, but in establishing the idea that the federal government should act as a guarantor of individual liberties,

it planted the seeds of that democracy.

...