Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. Du Bois

My first post here is of course a Goodreads review, but one of my favorite and the only one that won't show-up on the book's entry page because of a variety of silly structural reasons.

Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"From the first appearance of the Dunning School, dissenting voices had been raised, initially by a handful of survivors of the Reconstruction era and the small fraternity of black historians. In 1935, the black activist and scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois, published Black Reconstruction in America, a monumental study that portrayed Reconstruction as an idealistic effort to construct a democratic, interracial political order from the ashes of slavery, as well as a phase in a prolonged struggle between capital and labor for control of the South's economic resources. His book closed with the an indictment for of a profession whose writings had ignored the testimony of the principal actor in the drama of Reconstruction--the emancipated slave--and sacrificed scholarly objectivity on the altar of racial bias. 'One fact and one fact alone,' Du Bois wrote, 'explains the attitude of most recent writers toward Reconstruction; they cannot conceive of Negroes as men.' In many ways, Black Reconstruction anticipated the findings of modern scholarship. At the time, however, it was largely ignored." - from Reconstruction by Eric Foner

Sometimes I truly wonder if anybody reads these reviews, I've certainly wondered that lately. Though I contemplate this, I am urged on by an unknown force to write these things. Finishing this book marks the ending of a long three year journey that began in February of 2016 with The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism and concludes in August of 2018 with this book; in between, I read Battle Cry of Freedom. This was a personal survey of the United States in the 19th century. I wanted to explore the history of the country at that time and this one--and see what I would learn. Though I knew a lot about this time-period, I would learn a lot more--about America and about human history which as Matthew Arnold said reminds one of "the turbid ebb and flow of human misery." It is always a joy to learn, especially when one learns about something you thought you already knew. In the case of Reconstruction, one of the greatest events in World history, I did not know enough, but I had one of THE great teachers in William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Du Bois was the most accomplished African-American scholar in history by the time he wrote Black Reconstruction and this book would go down as his magnum opus, taking his pioneering sociology work and combining it with his growing understanding of Marxism. Du Bois was born in the middle of Reconstruction and would die in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. Given the cyclical-nature of history, I should not be surprised at the resemblance between the 11 years of Reconstruction (1865-1876) and the last 10 years (2009-2018) of the United States now (and I do stress "resemblance," instead of "the same as").

For hours both armies clambered up rocky ravines to escape annihilation or to destroy a little group of their countrymen, often neighbors on some jutting peak six thousand feet high, in a starving, bleeding, captive land. It came to mind that this was what had become of all our theories and visions of the workers’ and peasants’ struggle against the bourgeoisie.’ - Milovan Djilas

Reading this era, in a larger context, has taught me that the 400 year drama of my folk is not some wild ahistorical event, but fits in quite neatly with the story of most of human history--in fact, events that had knock-on effects for folks around the world who have never heard of Reconstruction. I was reminded a lot of the observations of The Half Has Never Been Told in this book, but Du Bois is willing to go a lot further than Ed Baptist.

This is year 5 of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent

"Never before in modern history has a conquered people treated their conqueror with such consummate arrogance. The South hid behind the darkness of the colored men and thumbed their noses at the nation."

The incredible thing is the miracle that Reconstruction happened and the tragedy of how close it was to working, yet fated for the silliest of reasons. I never appreciated just how much the white South refused to acknowledge its defeat or why it fought, but how easily they were let off the hook. I've been starting to read about European history and it has been an experience to realize how tragically-typical the collapse of Reconstruction and what came next was. You wonder how so much of the Confederate high-command could go unpunished, then you read this little passage from Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945:

"By the time the western Allies abandoned their denazification efforts with the coming of the Cold War, it was clear that these had had a decidedly limited impact. In Bavaria about half the secondary schoolteachers had been fired by 1946, only to be back in their jobs two years later. In 1949 the newly-established Federal Republic ended all investigations of the past behaviour of civil servants and army officers.

In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the regional Agriculture Ministry were ex-Nazis. By 1952 one in three of Foreign Ministry officials in Bonn was a former member of the Nazi Party. Of the newly-constituted West German Diplomatic Corps, 43 percent were former SS men and another 17 percent had served in the SD or Gestapo. Hans Globke, Chancellor Adenauer’s chief aide throughout the 1950s, was the man who had been responsible for the official commentary on Hitler’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws. The chief of police in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Wilhelm Hauser, was the Obersturmführer responsible for wartime massacres in Belarus.

"Even the Nazi judges and concentration camp doctors convicted under American jurisdiction saw their sentences reduced or commuted (by the American administrator, John J McCloy)."

It's not hard to see so how so many ex-Confederates (including the vice-president of the CSA) can come back to political and civil power after the Civil War and Reconstruction. But there were those that tried to make things right. A group of politicians, who Du Bois calls abolition-democracy, came into Congress during the lead-up to the Civil War and would stay in for the long-haul being either ousted from office at the end or dying in office. The two leaders were Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones character from the movie Lincoln) and Charles Sumner. Sumner was a revelation for me. In most American schools (including the ones that I went to) he is only briefly mentioned as that guy who gets beaten-up in the Senate by a pro-slavery politician. This has to be among one of the cruelest legacies in scholarship of the Dunning School-bigots. Sumner was the archetype of the modern human rights activist/politician. He spent his whole life fighting for full civil rights and citizenship for all people of the United States. Most of the success that is achieved in Congress during Reconstruction, he and Stevens are central to. There has not been a politician since who has been as willing, at all cost, to achieve true justice & reconciliation. It is telling that Bernie Sanders, the man thought to be the most radical politician of our time, cannot bring himself to advocate for reparations, yet Sumner was on his deathbed surrounded by Frederick Douglass and his few remaining Senatorial allies begging them to advocate for and rally support for his reparations bill--even as the planter-oligarchy was busy undoing all of his work.

"To men like Charles Sumner, the future of democracy in America depended on bringing the Southern revolution to a successful close by accomplishing two things: the making of the black freedmen really free, and the sweeping away of the animosities due to the war.
What liberalism did not understand was that such a revolution was economic and involved force. Those who against the public weal have power cannot be expected to yield save to superior power. The North used its power in the Civil War to break the political power of the slave barons. During and after the war, it united its force with that of the workers to uproot the still vast economic power of the planters. It hoped with the high humanitarianism of Charles Sumner eventually to induce the planter to surrender his economic power peacefully, in return for complete political amnesty, and hoped that the North would use its federal police power to maintain the black man’s civil rights in return for peaceful industry and increasing intelligence. But Charles Sumner did not realize, and that other Charles—Karl Marx—had not yet published Das Kapital to prove to men that economic power underlies politics. Abolitionists failed to see that after the momentary exaltation of war, the nation did not want Negroes to have civil rights and that national industry could get its way easier by alliance with Southern landowners than by sustaining Southern workers. They did not know that when they let the dictatorship of labor be overthrown in the South they surrendered the hope of democracy in America for all men. "

This books use of socialism is interesting. Du Bois' critique is not so much by-the-book socialism, because racism is not factored into most schools of socialist thought (though Marx was a Civil War correspondent himself); I like to think of it as Marxism-adjacent or affiliated. Marx had seen the abolition of slavery as a key opportunity to swell-up the ranks of American labor against both the growing power of Wall Street industry (who were in a very temporary alliance with the abolitionists) and the Southern oligarchs. Unfortunately, white American labor was not interested in the prospect of working with black laborers. White supremacy easily trumped proletarian idealism.

"As the Negro laborers organized separately, there came slowly to realization the fact that here was not only separate organization but a separation in leading ideas; because among Negroes, and particularly in the South, there was being put into force one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian revolution, had seen. That is, backed by the military power of the United States, a dictatorship of labor was to be attempted and those who were leading the Negro race in this vast experiment were emphasizing the necessity the political power and organization backed by protective military power.

On the other hand, the trade union movement of the white labor in the North was moving away from that idea and moving away from politics. They seemed to see a more purely economic solution in their demand for higher wages and shorter hours."

I, like Du Bois, will never understand why folks allow something as inconsequential as skin-color deny them so many otherwise easily achievable goals. While this book covers, in very extensive details the accomplishments of black folk during Reconstruction, one achievement that I had not know about was the establishing of public education in the South. It turns out that living in a feudal society denies many people--even of the free peasantry--an education. Given the fact that most African-Americans were illiterate when slavery was abolished, black and abolitionist leaders considered education as THE number one priority and the fact is that the public school system was one of the few things that the white supremacist governments did not dismantle post-1876. Hedging their bets, black politicians created with private and public funds the institutions that guaranteed that no matter what, black people would not be denied a Western education: Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Du Bois was educated as an undergrad at one, spent the majority of his teaching career (including the creation of this book) at another. I spent my first year of college at one. Because white Americans, regardless of political ideology, are uniformly against racial integration of education in the United States (to this very day), HBCUs are the only guarantee that African-Americans have of a proper undergrad education.

"Had it not been for the Negro school and college, the Negro would, to all intents and purposes, have been driven back to slavery. His economic foothold in land and capital was too slight in ten years of turmoil to effect[sic] any defense or stability. His reconstruction leadership had come from Negroes educated in the North, and white politicians, capitalists and philanthropic teachers. The counter-revolution of 1876 drove most of these, save the teachers, away. But already, through establishing public schools and private colleges, and by organizing the Negro church, the Negro had acquired enough leadership and knowledge to thwart the worst designs of the new slave drivers. They avoided the mistake of trying to meet force by force. They bent to the storm of beating, lynching and murder, and kept their souls in spite of public and private insult of every description; they built an inner culture which the world recognizes in spite of the fact that it is still half` strangled…"

"For those seven mystics years between Johnson’s “swing ‘round the circle” and the Panic of 1873, a majority of thinking Americans in the North believed in equal manhood of black folk. They acted accordingly with a clear-cut decisiveness and thorough logic, utterly incomprehensible to a day like ours which does not share this human faith; and to Southern whites this this period can only be explained by deliberate vengeance and hate.
The panic of 1873 brought sudden disillusion in business enterprise, economic organization, religious belief and political standards. A flood of appeal from the white South reinforced this reaction—appeal with no longer the arrogant bluster of slave oligarchy, but the simple moving annals of the plight of a conquered people. The resulting emotional and intellectual rebound of the nation made it nearly inconceivable in 1876 that ten years earlier most men had believed in human equality."

Ah, almost forgot to say a few what the point of this book is.

What is the object of writing the history of Reconstruction? Is it to wipe out the disgrace of a people which fought to make slaves of Negroes? Is it to show that the North had higher motives than freeing black men? Is it to prove that Negroes were black angels? No, it is simply to establish the Truth, on which Right in the future may be built. We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard truth as more important than the defense of the white men, and who will not deliberately encourage students to support a prejudice or buttress a lie.

If you have read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, you know how bad history-textbooks are now, but in the era Loewen calls "the nadir of race relations" they were horrific. This was mainly the work of a cabal of history grad-students from the South that met at Colombia University named for the most senior history professor of their conspiracy, William Dunning, called the Dunning School. Du Bois wrote this book at end of their influence, but it wasn't until the 1960s that other historians started to acknowledge the books greatness. Add that two foreign Georges--Campbell and Clemenceau (yes WWI)--also were in the USA writing histories of the Reconstruction era during the era's decline and its destruction. This then makes sense when you see the fates of the British and French Empire in the century to come.

"The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with the full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell; and after its whirlwind a teacher sits in academic halls, learned in the tradition of its elms and elders. He looks into the upturned face of youth and in him sees the gowned shape of wisdom and hears the voice of God. Cynically he sneers at “chinks” and “niggers.”

“Immediately in Africa, a black back runs red with the blood of the lash; in India, a brown girl is raped; in China, a coolie starves; in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched; while in London, the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk. Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth, while brains of little children smear the hills.

This is education in the Nineteenth Hundred and Thirty-fifth year of the Christ; this is modern and exact social science;…ad quos hae literae pervenerint: Salutem in Domino, sempeternam!"

View all my reviews