Slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow

An 1868 political cartoon by Thomas Nast “Patience on a Monument,” depicting the horrors suffered by African Americans and the efforts by the Republican Party's Reconstruction to help rectify the injustice.

The Monument to Patience

It was never built. And thus, in our age of toppling monuments, it never came down. But in October 1868, Thomas Nast imagined a monument to racial violence that continues to haunt us.