We’re coming to you a day later than usual because on Wednesday the Washington Post broke an explosive story about Attorney General Jeff Sessions lying to Congress about contacts with the government of Russia. What does it mean that some of our country’s most powerful officials are colluding with a foreign power? And what can we do?

The wave of anti-minority violence following Trump’s election is much like the post–Civil War Reconstruction era, when black Americans began to engage in society as citizens and were met with a wave of reactionary violence, including the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. In order to understand where we are today, we must look back at Reconstruction and how it began to change our country and in the end failed to bring equality.

Voter suppression has long been a strategy to influence the outcome of elections by discouraging or preventing people from voting. This was certainly the case in 2016, helping to hand the White House to Trump.