By Kathy Roberts Forde and Bryan Bowman , University of Massachusetts Amherst, for The Conversation

The U.S. criminal justice system is riven by racial disparity.

The Obama administration pursued a plan to reform it. An entire news organization, The Marshall Project , was launched in late 2014 to cover it. Organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Sentencing Project are dedicated to unmaking a system that unjustly targets people of color.

But how did we get this system in the first place? Our ongoing historical research project investigates the relationship between the press and convict labor. While that story is still unfolding, we have learned what few Americans, especially white Americans, know: the dark history that produced our current criminal justice system.

If anything is to change if we are ever to end this racial nightmare, and achieve our country, as James Baldwin put it we must confront this system and the blighted history that created it.

During Reconstruction, the 12 years following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, former slaves made meaningful political, social and economic gains. Black men voted and even held public office across the South. Biracial experiments in governance flowered. Black literacy surged , surpassing those of whites in some cities . Black schools, churches and social institutions thrived.

As the prominent historian Eric Foner writes in his masterwork on Reconstruction, Black participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.

But this moment was short-lived.

As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote , the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.

History is made by human actors and the choices they make.

According to Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name, the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition, and the rest of the countrys accommodation, explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.

Designed to reverse black advances, Redemption was an organized effort by white merchants, planters, businessmen and politicians that followed Reconstruction. Redeemers employed vicious racial violence and state legislation as tools to prevent black citizenship and equality promised under the 14th and 15th amendments.