Black Reconstruction on YouTube, Episode 2

Still experimenting with how I plan to post about this series, so I'll try this out for this post.

View this post on Instagram

@thereadinseries posted chapters 3 & 4 of Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. Du Bois on YouTube being read by @thereal_shafiq , @michaelmichaeltheartist , and @marquisevilson respectively. Chapter 3 dealt with the Planter oligarchy as it looked before the Civil War, while chapter 4 dealt with the American Civil War itself as it relates to Reconstruction since much of the foundations of Reconstruction were created during the war. What I liked about chapter 4 is how Du Bois really demonstrates that black people—even as they were enslaved—had to make their moves pragmatically. Because of the initial Northern policy of not ending slavery, black workers had to wait and persist until a small Northern faction (which Du Bois calls Abolition-Democracy) was able to lobby the United States towards emancipation and the use and arming of black workers against the Confederates. A very good read here. #bookstagram #book #blackreconstruction #webdubois #thereadinseries #shafiqhicks #michaelmcelroy #marquisevilson #blackwriters #blackhistory #americancivilwar #reconstruction #history #americanhistory #diverseclassics #classicliterature #nonfiction #bookcollection #blackmenread #bibliophile #wellreadblackguy

A post shared by Ken's Bookshelf & Movieshelf (@rinehartstation) on Sep 7, 2020 at 6:33am PDT

My Goodreads Review of The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

This may be my most popular or second most popular review on Goodreads which is astonishing to me since I personally think I have written much better. But given the wide-lack of knowledge people have of Du Bois and the way that popularity does not always equal quality when it comes to popular opinions, I 'm not totally shocked. I am happy I helped interest more folks on this scholar and his work.

The Souls of Black Folk (Everyman's Library by W.E.B. Du Bois
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother's children were angry with me;
They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
But mine own vineyard have I not kept." - Song of Solomon 1:5-6 KJV

Bright Sparkles in the Churchyard

These are the lyrical and musical epigraphs preceding chapter seven.


"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." This is going to be a hard book to review well. That is because of how well rounded and layered this book is at examining African-American life. There is much in this book that has made it so special. This book is to modern sociology what The Interpretation of Dreams was for psychology. In this book W.E.B. Du Bois offered one of the most complete studies of African-American life, history, politics, and culture. No book has really been able to over-shadow its relevance and its timelessness. It was written by the first Black man to earn a Harvard University doctorate degree. The book was published in 1903, a generation removed from slavery in the United States, yet it is still relevant to my life (four generations removed from slavery) and the present day. 112 years has not seen a lot of time pass!

This book has been the foundation text that civil rights and Black advancement in America was built on. This book influenced so many people whose careers come out of it. From the Harlem Renaissance to the thesis of my favorite novel (Invisible Man) to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness all find roots in this book. Du Bois would, in the long years after 1903, change is stance on certain ideas presented in this book, most famously concerning his theory on The Talented Tenth, but he never had anything beyond spelling or proofreading corrections done in subsequent editions of this book since he wanted it to stand as a snapshot of how he saw the world in 1903.

Trying to list the ideas and multiple purposes this book is putting forward is maddening. It puts forward in idea that a special 10% of African-Americans would become this alpha-class that would lead the rest of the race (he abandoned that as his interest in socialism grew). The book also list the theory of Black people having "double-consciousness" which he defines as the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." He goes onto say that the history of Black Folks is the tension between this duality of identity and I do not see any good counter-argument to this from my personal experience.

"Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half- hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, -- peculiar even for one who has never been anything else..."

The above quote is from the first two paragraphs of the book. This excerpt is something that Black Americans consciously or unconsciously have to always confront. Of course this book, being part self-study, uses Du Bois own life in order to examine the Black experience.

This book is also a very thorough polemic against Booker T. Washington. Du Bois sees Washington and his influence as one of the worst calamities to hit the African-American nation. Booker T. Washington believed that Black people should not seek social equality or political independence, but should strive for economic equality only and be guided on political matters under strict, White supervision; Black education should not include the liberal arts, but be limited to vocational trades. All of this infuriated Du Bois and led to an intense rivalry between the two that only ended with Washington's death in 1915. A whole chapter of this book is devoted solely to refuting Washington and his accommodationist beliefs.

The sad state of political status and employment of Black Folk are also covered in this book and it is depressing to see how much things have not changed. Given the recent spat of police shootings it makes reading the following quote even more painful:

"...the police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves...For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the South had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police. Thus grew up a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. For, as I have said, the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of re-enslaving the blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man's conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims. - from chapter 9.

This has been confirmed, by now, as not just a Southern problem, but as a nation-wide issue now. Another issue is the lack of balanced employment. Du Bois was convinced that if greedy land-owners did not perpetually swindle Black people out of ownership, there would not be such a large movement of people from rural areas to the urban areas. He was, in-fact, witnessing the origins of The Great Migration.

One of the more interesting things covered in this book are Negro Spirituals. Each chapter of this book contains two epigraphs (as demonstrated at the beginning of this review). One is a random quote vaguely related to the chapter, but the second quote is a musical notation of a passage from a spiritual. The last chapter of this book is dedicated to talking about the deep cultural and artistic importance of the spirituals (called Sorrow Songs by Du Bois) and he talks about their origins and of the musical group most noted for interpreting them: The Fisk Jubilee Singers. Each chapter quotation is also listed in this part of the book, but if you can read music you will guess the universally recognized ones like Swing Low or Steal Away.

While I would like to keep thoroughly dissecting this book, I will probably just keep shaping the review as I think of new things to examine in it, in the future I may keep adding on, but I find that it is especially difficult for me to analyze this book that is so old, but so relevant and personal. I will give Dr. Du Bois the last word then:


"Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed

THE END"

View all my reviews

Black Reconstruction on YouTube, Episode 1

This channel called The Read-In Series has decided to do a read-along of W. E. B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America on YouTube. To call such a project ambitious is an understatement, but since it is happening I have decided to follow it along with them and re-visit this massive work (I rarely reread any books these day--certainly not books of this length). I am a big fan of this book. The first episode was read by Phylicia Rashad for chapter 1 & Yvette Nicole Brown for chapter 2. Rashad did a masterful job as expected, but poor Ms. Brown was so nervous and rushing through the chapter that I had to put the playback speed on 0.75x to follow along with her. In any case, I like being able to revisit the work and I will give some thoughts on chapters here as I am able to follow-along.

Chapters 1 & 2 serve to set the scene of what is to come and what this book is partially about. That Du Bois begins this book before Reconstruction is a formality, but serves as his way to offer the fullest rebuking of the Dunning School that he was able to do. These two chapters--The Black Worker & The White Worker, respectively--also introduces us to the framework that Du Bois is analyzing this history. He is not using any sort of mythological sentimentality here, but he is relying on straight historical materialism to analyze this. I call this book Marxist-adjacent rather than simply Marxist, because as Du Bois shows in the chapter on white workers, the white labor movement in the USA never seriously contemplated working with black workers or fighting for the abolition of slavery--even when such abolition would be favorable to conditions of the white laborers themselves. White workers, regardless of class or geographic location, felt that they could either own slaves themselves or go west and keep black labor out of that territory. As we'll find out, even attempts by Karl Marx and the First International to get white workers to unionize with black workers after the Civil War fail and lead to whites-only anti-socialist groups like the AFL coming to power. Chapter 2 pretty-much tells you why Bernie Sanders can't win the Black Belt today: black people know that white Socialists have never truly had their backs when all was said and done.  Black labor was trying at all manner to resist there fate, but it was hopeless in the South. Only as emigration of black people to the North started to stir the conscience of a small group of white people called Abolitionist, than some started to really consider the impossible idea of the ending of Slavery. I think the recasting this as a labor struggle that has race as the fundamental agent (i.e. the hardened belief by a majority of whites of an inherent inhumanity of black people) really expands the scope of this period and enables a vaster and much more profound story to be told. It restores the agency of black people in this story about black people and makes the actions taken by the different actors in this book more honest to the truth. Anyone who reads this will discover quite soon why W. E. B. Du Bois is America's greatest scholar: his merging of scholarship and poetics into prefect harmony is something to behold. Returning to this book after the 2020 American Athletic Strikes and their aftermath, the lessons of this book are critically present.

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