Black Intellectuals, Black Archives, and a Second American Founding

The color-blind pandemic of COVID-19 has found common ground with America's perpetual racial pandemic. The country's natural anti-Black social antibodies, sufficient until now to fend off attempts to infect it with new life as a re-imagined experiment in plurality and equality, are threatened anew with a multiracial, intergenerational, and multi-class general strike against the existing order. More even than a Third Reconstruction, what may be emerging from the current viral attack is a Second Founding, this one bereft of the white nationalist anchors of the first. The concept of an American people working collectively toward "a more perfect union" is preceded by recruitment into a different kind of cause than the one Carr was drafted into by his neighborhood, Sunday School, and K-12 teachers before receiving the officer training provided by our historically Black universities, followed by superannuated training in HWCU Law and Africana Studies programs.