Introduction: Black Reconstruction After 90 Years

1 The race problem has someti:mes been described as a problem in assimilation. It is not always clear, however, what assimilation means. Historically the word has had two distinct significations. According to earlier usage it meant "to compare" or "to make like." According to later usage it signifies "to take up and incorporate." There is a process that goes on in society by which individuals spontaneously acquire one another's language, characteristic attitudes, habits, and modes of behavior. There is also a process by which individuals and groups of individuals are taken over and incorporated into larger groups. Both processes have been concerned in the formation of modern nationalities. The modern Italian, Frenchman, and German is a composite of the broken fragments of several different racial groups. Interbreeding has broken up the ancient stocks, and interaction and imitation have created new national types which exhibit definite uniformities in language, manners, and formal behavior. It has sometimes been assumed that the creation of a national type is the specific function of assimilation and that national solidarity is based upon national homogeneity and "like-mindedness." The extent and importance of the kind of homogeneity that individuals of the same nationality exhibit have been greatly exaggerated. Neither interbreeding nor interaction has created, in what the French term "nationals," a more than superficial likeness or like-mindedness. Racial differences have, to be sure, disappeared or been obscured, but individual differences remain. Individual differences, again, have been intensified by education,

Recent events have augured a renewed urgency among political scientists to address the instability of democracy and the structure of racism in the United States. In this article, I make the case for American political development (APD) scholars to engage more deeply with Black Reconstruction in America (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois's masterful study of political development during the Reconstruction Era. This rich text, which analyzes an often overlooked period in the APD literature, offers numerous contributions that can reinvigorate our analyses of democracy and racism in the United States.

Reviewed by: Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation ed. by David W. Blight and Jim Downs Brian Kelly (bio) Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. Edited by David W. Blight and Jim Downs. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Pp. 208. Cloth $79.95; paper, $24.95.) The problem at the core of this collection—the contested and multiple meanings of freedom after the American Civil War—enters the [End Page 168] historiography of emancipation from two distinct vantage points. First, the differing perspectives of the main protagonists—planters, freedpeople, deliverers—figure prominently in a complicated historical narrative. They brought varying, often irreconcilable understandings of freedom to bear in the protracted confrontation opened up by emancipation. W. E. B. DuBois noted more than eighty years ago in Black Reconstruction in America that these "contending and antagonistic groups spoke different and unknown tongues," shouting past one another while attempting to advance their particular visions. There is a second path by which differing conceptions of freedom enter the literature: interpretive differences among historians aiming to reconstruct the past have shaped understanding no less than the documentary record itself. Malicious assumptions about black inferiority permeated scholarship associated with the Dunning school well into the twentieth century. Subjected to withering assault by DuBois in 1935, it was ultimately dislodged after a revisionist surge driven by the postwar black freedom struggle. This new framework found full expression in the publication of Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 in 1988. Foner acknowledges his debt to DuBois, and like others attempting to bring the archive to bear on the interpretive framework animating Black Reconstruction in America, his work reflects not merely the rejection of Dunning's crude racism but a positive embrace of DuBois's attention to political economy. Much of the impressive scholarship generated in the immediate post–civil rights era attributes substantial responsibility for the gap between freedpeople's expansive vision and Redemption's dismal reality to the outworkings of Republican free labor ideology. Leading scholars focused closely on new challenges facing the "emancipated worker," locating freedom's shortcomings not only in the malevolence of the usual suspects—the Klan, embittered ex-Confederates, former masters—but in the cramped variant of freedom on offer from the slaves' ostensible liberators. This collection, drawing together eleven essays by leading historians of emancipation, aims to move beyond the "freedom paradigm"—a framework that, the editors suggest, meets with growing ambivalence (3). The volume includes thoughtful, impressive stand-alone essays that explore the dynamics shaping events between the antebellum period and the late nineteenth century. Yet read end to end, it is the book's gaps and omissions that are striking. Though the editors deny any intent "to advance an argument or to upset a particular way of thinking" (x), together with the absence of any but a fleeting mention of conflict over land or labor, the [End Page 169] volume's neglect of political economy marks a clear departure from the historiographical legacy outlined above. Beyond Freedom opens with four essays exploring emancipation's prehistory and concludes with a set of extended, sometimes intimate reflections on sources and methodology. In between are three essays grouped under "The Politics of Freedom," just one of which focuses on the poste-mancipation South. James Oakes's illumination of the Republicans' bedrock commitment to antislavery takes the reader into some familiar terrain, but neither of the others is especially concerned with politics, even in its broadest sense. The editors note at the outset that contributions are not intended as case studies grounded in archival research, though Justin Behrend's study of violence in Reconstruction Mississippi and Brenda E. Stevenson's essay on the ritualization of slave marriages come close. While Beyond Freedom's temporal and thematic breadth offers something for everyone, the same qualities render it difficult to identify common threads. Richard Newman begins the first section, "From Slavery to Freedom," with an essay on antiabolitionists' penchant for conjuring the alleged failures of Atlantic emancipation to deflect attacks on southern slavery. Susan O'Donovan challenges the depiction of slaves as inert and apolitical, suggesting instead that the roads and waterways traversing the Cotton South doubled as...

In 1951 Du Bois was indicted by the U.S. federal government for being an agent of a foreign state as a result of his work with the Peace Information Center, an organization committed to peace activism and nuclear disarmament. As detailed in his often-overlooked 1952 book, In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday, the then eighty-two-year-old Du Bois was arrested, handcuffed, searched for concealed weapons, fingerprinted, briefly jailed, and subsequently released on bail. However, his passport was immediately revoked and remained canceled until 1958. Du Bois’s misguided support for dictatorial leaders like Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, who claimed to be communist and committed to Marxist principles, has caused many scholars to disregard or even lampoon his late life work and instead focus almost exclusively on his early and middle years prior to his 1935 publication of Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Considering the complex nature of his life, scholarship, and activism, this article’s primary objective is to provide a brief overview of Du Bois’s discourse on, and development of, democratic socialism, both before and after In Battle for Peace.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1935/1998) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 is commonly regarded as the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography. But Black Reconstruction did more than correct the historical record, it also interrogated the very limits of historiography—what it can communicate, and what and who its “appropriate” subjects should be. Drawing on Susan Gillman’s concept of race melodrama as the dominant framework for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century racial thinking, this article posits Black Reconstruction as a race melodrama par excellence, with special emphasis on the text’s strategic invocations of music in emotionally and spiritually charged moments. To this end, it traces Du Bois’s use of song, scenes of singing, librettos, and lyrics as both an affective and de-familiarizing device through which he is able to yoke the former slaves’ messianic/religious experience of freedom and their understanding of democracy.

While the power of the American Dream persists, in Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, W. E. B. Du Bois challenges the historicity of the concept by detailing a profoundly different origin story. Du Bois details an alternative history placing the American Dream as a mid-twentieth-century invention and outgrowth of the Great Depression. Rather than a founding premise, in Du Bois’s rendering of the American Dream, it is nothing more than a derivative of what he terms the “American Assumption.” With great historical specificity, Du Bois proves that the American Dream is intentionally devoid of the context of enslavement, land dispossession, and the events preceding and following the Civil War and Reconstruction. This essay combines key passages in Black Reconstruction with sociobiographical context to excavate key Du Boisian contributions to the sociology of knowledge, poverty, mobility, and inequality through the dissection of the American Dream mythology.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsW. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in AmericaRayford W. LoganRayford W. Logan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 21, Number 1January 1936 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2714546 Views: 7Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1936, 1964, 1969 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

W.E.B. Du Bois’ theorization of the ‘wages of whiteness’ has factored prominently into recent scholarship examining the roots of Trumpism and resurgent right-wing movements in the United States. How might the ‘wages of whiteness’ shed light on contemporary anti-environmental politics? To provide insight into this question, I put Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, as well as more recent work in whiteness studies, into conversation with environmental and social histories of the mid-nineteenth century frontier. I observe that struggles over access to and control over land and natural resources, and anger over exposure to polluted air and water, were central to class and racial formation during an historical period that continues to weigh heavily on contemporary American politics. I argue that understanding the origins and evolution of the natural wages of whiteness can help us develop strategies for combating anti-environmentalism and mobilizing in pursuit of environmental justice.

This paper argues that W. E. B. Du Bois was far ahead of his time in understanding the deep connection between racial oppression and crime, and that his insights remain crucially important today. Three of those insights, or takeaways, are especially important: that racial oppression has consequences; that those consequences—though profound—are reversible through concerted social action; and that our failure to sustain and build on the successes of the Reconstruction era and beyond in addressing the roots of violence is the most fundamental cause of the persistence of endemic crime in Black communities. I trace Du Bois's views through three of his most compelling works— The Philadelphia Negro, The Souls of Black Folk, and Black Reconstruction in America —and highlight their special importance in an age in which, yet again, hard-won steps toward racial equality are being steadily and systematically rolled back through regressive social policy.

Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880

Black Reconstruction. An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880

<i>Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880.</i>W. E. Burghardt Du Bois

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, MATC 2019Reinventing Reconstruction and Scripting Civil Rights in Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’ Julie Burrell (bio) On February 23, 1968, in what would be one of his final public addresses, Martin Luther King Jr. paid tribute to the life and work of W. E. B. Du Bois as part of a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth. In the speech at Carnegie Hall, King distinguished Du Bois’s work as a historian, selecting for special praise the monumental work of historical revisionism, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), which helped overturn nearly a century of white supremacist histories. Such histories, King declared, were responsible for “a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history and the stakes were high.” King insisted that the stakes of misremembering and misconstruing African Americans’ role in the drama of Reconstruction was the perpetuation of Jim Crow: “If, as white historians tell it, Negroes wallowed in corruption, opportunism, displayed spectacular stupidity, were wanton, evil, and ignorant, their case was made. They would have proved that freedom was dangerous in the hands of inferior beings.”1 Two decades before King’s Carnegie Hall speech, African American playwright Theodore Ward had argued that the continued success or failure of the civil rights movement depended in no small part on the nation’s memory of the first Reconstruction. Ward’s underappreciated masterpiece Our Lan’ was first performed in 1947, initially at the Lower East Side’s Henry Street Settlement House, before becoming one of the few African American–authored dramas to reach Broadway in the first half of the twentieth century. Our Lan’ depicts a group of recently freed African Americans claiming their forty acres and a [End Page 215] mule on a disused cotton plantation. In the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and changing federal policies that were more sympathetic to white former landowners, the freedpeople stage a doomed rebellion in an attempt to keep their land. Ward began composing Our Lan’ in the early 1940s, soon after the film version of Gone with the Wind (1939) had reinforced white supremacist narratives that depicted Reconstruction as a time of farcical yet tyrannical rule over the South by black people and white Northerners. Our Lan’ was part of an upsurge of black-authored, counter-hegemonic cultural texts combatting stage and screen distortions of the era that treated black men as ignorant buffoons or dangerous beasts and portrayed black women predominantly through the sentimental trope of the mammy. Like Ward, African American playwrights including William Branch, Theodore Browne, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Hayden, and Langston Hughes reworked black folk culture and revised popular accounts of the past in an attempt to wrest control of black historical representation away from white supremacists. Moreover, Ward is one of the foremost writers of the civil rights era to suggest that Reconstruction ushered in a re-entrenchment of slavery maintained by white supremacist tactics such as sharecropping and state violence. Ward frames Reconstruction as “the nonevent of emancipation,” Saidiya Hartman’s term for “the perpetuation of the plantation system and the refiguration of subjection.”2 Our Lan’ invites us to consider how “the afterlives of Reconstruction” endure beyond the supposed end point of Reconstruction and align with a broad strand of African American thought that is fundamentally at odds with an imagined break between slavery and freedom called emancipation.3 Recent studies such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name, as well as the black feminists and activists of the Black Lives Matter and prison abolition movements, have contended that structures of domination have been refigured through chain-gang labor and imprisonment, legal restrictions and Black Codes, and the spectacular terrorism effected through white Americans’ violence against black Americans, including lynchings and police killings. Black emancipatory discourse has frequently resisted the idea of freedom as a fixed point or historical event; the lyrics to “Freedom Is Constant Struggle,” performed during civil rights protests by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee-affiliated Freedom Singers, captures this fittingly: “They say that freedom is a constant struggle / O Lord, we...

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America