Two decades later, in the 1960s, Gov. George Corley Wallace Jr. of Alabama was one of the most effective practitioners of the politics of division Wright had described in the 1940s. After rising to fame by trying to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, Wallace ran for president in 1964 and again in 1968 (he was shot during a third bid in 1972) and found receptive audiences among alienated working-class whites far beyond the South. In Marshall Frady’s compelling biography “Wallace,” an unnamed moderate Alabama politician says that what Wallace is “ trying to do in the nation is what he’s managed to do in Alabama. When you draw the line the way he does, the whites go with the white, and the blacks with the black, and when that happens, you’re in for warfare.” Frady then quotes “a former Alabama senator,” who adds: “It’s conceivable that he could win a state like Illinois or even California when he puts the hay down where the goats can get at it. He can use all the other issues — law and order, running your own schools, protecting property rights — and never mention race. But people will know … What Wallace is doing is talking to them in a kind of shorthand, a kind of code.” It is not difficult to draw a line between Wallace and the current president of the United States. With a large and important distinction: Trump speaks from the White House.

In “The Inner Conflict,” Warren mused about the path forward. “We have to deal with the problem our historical moment proposes, the burden of our time,” he wrote. “We all live with a thousand unsolved problems of justice all the time. We don’t even recognize a lot of them. We have to deal only with those which the moment proposes to us … All we can do for posterity is to try to plug along in a way to make them think we — the old folks — did the best we could for justice, as we could understand it.” Doing the best we can requires looking back, but, as Warren noted, we’ll all be judged not by the past but what we make of it in disheartening moments — moments like our own.