Yale historian David Blight closes his DeVane Lecture Series course on slavery and its legacies by asking when Reconstruction actually ended, and whether it ever fully did. He walks through competing end dates, 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, 1883 and the Supreme Court's gutting of civil rights protections, 1965 and the Voting Rights Act, and poses 2024 as a live continuation of the same argument. The lecture ties Reconstruction's unfinished business to Yale's own institutional history with slavery and to recurring American crises over whether a pluralistic constitutional democracy can survive its own contradictions. Blight moves through political, constitutional, and commemorative legacies, treating the post-Civil War settlement as a set of unresolved questions rather than a closed chapter. It is the final class in a numbered lecture series, delivered as straight historical argument grounded in documents and case law rather than partisan commentary.