This seems like a good time to share my semi-regular reminder that the final chapter of Du Bois’ Black Recontruction should be taught in every American history class. In setting the record straight Du Bois produced what co-editor Eric Foner has called an “indispensable book,” a magisterial work of detached scholarship that is also imbued with passionate outrage. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected.” “The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself,” Du Bois argued, “has been almost barred from court. One of the towering African American thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois brought all his intellectual powers to bear on the nation’s post-Civil War era of political reorganization, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and ultimately yielded to the consolidation of the unjust social order of Jim Crow.īlack Reconstruction is a pioneering work of revisionist scholarship that, in the wake of the censorship of Du Bois’s characterization of Reconstruction by the Encyclopedia Britannica, was written to debunk influential historians whose racist ideas and emphases had disfigured the historical record. Du Bois’s now classic Black Reconstruction in America offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction - and of U.S.
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