This is Brian Lairr's Daily Politics Podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Friday, June 19.

I'm Kai Wright, host of the WNYC podcast, the United States of Anxity, sitting in for Brian today. Today is Juneteenth,

and we are spending the entire show reflecting on this holiday and what it means in this

moment that we are living through. So in this hour, we're going to talk about Juneteenth in relationship

to our politics. Juneteenth is a marker of black Americans' emancipation. So in many ways,

it's also a marker for the beginning of the Reconstruction area, which is the period following the

Civil War and which this country rewrote its constitution. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments

ended slavery, established the idea of equal rights under the law, and gave black men, at least,

the right to vote. And all of this helped create new political coalitions and began new

political debates that in many ways continue to divine electoral politics today. So to think

about that history and about the 2020 elections and about the role black people have played in electoral politics since Reconstruction, I am joined by Adam Sir, who is the staff writer at the Atlantic and covers politics.

Adam, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I wanted to talk to you for this because you are one of the writers I follow who is both

closely watching today's politics but also is deeply read in on the long,

long history of these debates we're having.

And you've written about the lessons that we can learn from the politics of the Reconstruction era.

So I just want to start there.

And I wonder if you could kind of set the stage for us about the political landscape in those years after emancipation.

I mean, one thing a lot of people forget is just how many black people were participating in politics, just how many black elected officials there were, for instance.

Right. So emancipation ushers in an era, sort of a kind of golden age of participatory politics for black Americans.

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