A modern-day civil rights champion tells the stirring story of how he helped take up a movement to bridge America’s racial separate.

Over the summer of 2013, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II led more than a hundred thousand people at rallies across North Carolina to protest limitations to voting gain access to and an extreme makeover of state government. These protests-the largest state government-focused civil disobedience advertising campaign in American history-came to become referred to as Moral Mondays and also have about THE 3RD Reconstruction: What sort of Moral Movement Can be Conquering the Politics of Department and Fear since blossomed in state governments as diverse as Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New York.

At the same time when divide-and-conquer politics are exacerbating racial strife and economic inequality, Rev. Barber offers an impassioned, historically grounded argument that Moral Mondays are hard evidence of an embryonic Third Reconstruction in the us.

The first Reconstruction briefly flourished after Emancipation, and the next Reconstruction ushered in meaningful progress in the civil rights era. But both had been met by ferocious reactionary methods that significantly curtailed, and perhaps rolled back, racial and economic improvement. This Third Reconstruction is certainly a profoundly moral awakening of justice-loving people united in a fusion coalition powerful more than enough to reclaim the possibility of democracy-even in the face of corporate-financed extremism.

With this memoir of how Rev. Barber and allies as varied as intensifying Christians, union members, and immigration-rights activists came together to build a coalition, he gives a trenchant evaluation of race-based inequality and a hopeful message for the nation grappling with consistent racial and economic injustice. Rev. Barber writes movingly-and pragmatically-about how he laid the groundwork to get a state-by-state motion that unites dark, white, and brown, rich and poor, utilized and unemployed, homosexual and straight, noted and undocumented, religious and secular. Only such a different fusion movement, Rev. Barber argues, can heal our nation’s wounds and generate public policy that is morally defensible, constitutionally constant, and economically sane. The Third Reconstruction can be both a blueprint for movement building and an uplifting call to action in the twenty-first century’s most reliable grassroots organizer.