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"

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My Goodreads Review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

I read this book back at the tail-end of BLM I and it was the beginning of a deep examination of history for me which is still ongoing. I don't think this review does justice to how good this book actually is, but I hope folks don't mind that. This was me before I had perfected my reviewing skills to their current state.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It has been said that the Civil War was 'unnecessary' because slavery was already destined to end, probably within a few decades after the 1860 election. Yet this is mere dogma. The evidence points in the opposite directions. Slavery yielded ever more efficient production, in contrast to the free labor that tried (and failed) to compete with it, and the free labor that succeeded it. If slave labor in cotton had ever hit a wall of ultimate possibility, enslavers could have found new commodities. Southern enslavers had adapted slavery before, with incredibly profitable results. Forced labor that is slavery in everything but name remained tremendously important to the world economy well into the twenty-first century. And the lessons that enslavers learned about turning the left hand to the service of the right, forcing ordinary people to reveal their secrets so that those secrets could be commodified, played out in unsteady echoes that we have called by many names (scientific management, the stretch-out, management studies) and heard in many places. Though these were not slavery, they are one more way in which the human world still suffers without knowing it from the crimes done to Rachel and William and Charles Ball and Lucy Thurston; mourns for them unknowing, even as we live on the gains that were stolen from them."

This is the United Nations International Decade of People of African Descent . Here is a preface document that is relevant to this review: http://ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/...

Starting from the heart and ending with a full corpse, this book is a revolutionary, but very familiar (depending on what you already knew) look at how the United States went from laughably broke at the end of the American Revolution to being the 19th century version of Saudi Arabia in terms of world-supplying resource. Ed Baptist quotes from Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act that American history was a drama played on the body of a "Negro giant." He takes this as the theme of the book and looks at how the discovery of how easily cotton could be grown provided the key jewel in the crown of the Industrial Revolution. Baptist looks at enslavers ever growing quest for both making the enslaved pick more cotton and obtaining more land for them to be transported to. He also looks at attempts by the enslaved to resist (until that fails) and simply survive, by any small measure, the process.

Baptist's labor in this book is stunning. He lays any type of pleasantry or "respectability" language aside and gives you the very cold, harsh, brutal truth of what happened between the 1780s and 1860. This book gives an amazing amount of respect and dignity to the people who were, in their words, always being "stolen" and destroyed by enslavers. This book's authenticity moved me in a profound way and really made me feel what people like Lorenzo Ivy, Charles Ball (who is a key character in this book), Rachel, Ben, Amar and other enslaved people whose stories are examined in this book. The examination of the impact that forced migration south and west had on Africans turning into African-Americans in the process (as well as their culture and religion that survives to this day in modern African-American, and really Western, culture). The use of both the primary sources of the oppressed and oppressors was very powerful.

The economics thread of this book (this is an "economic history") really enlightened me. Though I think most African-Americans would have guessed that American slavery built American capitalism, I was surprised at how much it also contributed to Europe's Industrial Revolution, in particular Great Britain. Essentially, blood-soaked cotton was turning Great Britain into the world power that would never see nighttime. As much as the UK loves to mouth-off about banning the slave trade and slavery itself before the rest of the Western world, it was British entrepreneurs, stock brokers, and government officials invested in cotton before the Panic of 1837 and enslaved people directly afterwards, so much for that. The fact that Monaco was still trying to get the state of Mississippi to pay its debts in the 1930s was amazing.

I hope this book gets taught not just as a history book, but as an economics book. This book lays bare the fact that slavery's economic mission...was a rousing success. The numbers do not lie: setting a minimum number that a person had to meet and beating them severely when they did not reach that number while raising that number every time it was met-for 80 years-can turn you from a third world country to a first world country in under a century if you do it on a industrial scale (and never pay the people you beat and also raping them, lots of rape). This is one of those sad, cynical facts about the nature of the world (just look at any 20th century genocide, it usually does what it sets out to do). The after-effects of 250 years of degradation and depravity go un-punished and in-fact, as recent years have shown, can be used to effectively disposes the decedents of enslaved people in the United States (I remind you that Mike Brown of Ferguson is buried just across town from Dred Scott). Please read this book! It is one of the best history/economic texts I have read in some time.

"The militia stood Amar up in the yard at the Widow Charbonnet's place. Herded into an audience, the men, women, and children who knew him had to watch. The white men took aim and made Amar's body dance with a volley of lead. In his head, as he slumped and fell, were 50 billion neurons. They held the secrets of turning sugarcane sap into white crystals, they held the memories that made him smile at just such a joke, they held the cunning with which he sought out his lover's desires, they held the names of all the people who stood circled in silence. His cheek pressed on earth that his own feet had helped to pack, his mouth slackly coursing out blood, as gunpowder smoke gathered in a cloud and blew east. A white officer's sideways boots strode toward him. The dancing electrons in Amar's brain caressed forty-five years of words, pictures, feelings, the village imam with his old book, his mother calling him from the door of a mud-brick house. The memory of a slave ship or maybe more than one, the rumor of Saint-Domingue -- all this was there, was him -- but his cells were cascading into sudden death. One last involuntary wheeze as a soldier raised an axe sharpened by recent practice and severed Amar's head from his body"

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My Ideal Method of Teaching Myself Through Reading and Research (I'll think of a better title later)

 With all the excitement and talk going around about Isabel Wilkerson's new book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, I thought I would use my preparation to read the book and share how I ideally want to go about preparing to read this book. Now from reading the synopsis, checking-out a review or two, and watching the many promotional interviews about this book I realize that this book is looking at the concept of caste and how it is used in the United States in the formation of racial hierarchy compared to how the Nazi's would use American racism in their regime and how caste has been used in India. Now in these cases I like to apply something I will call for the sake of this blog post "the single story test." This test is to see if any knowledge I have attained over time has been left to violate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's single-story trap that she laid-out in her lecture "The Danger of A Single Story." I ask myself:

1. Does the information or "story" I have come from one source or multiple? 
2. Does the information I have take itself as correct uncritically without any mention of any counter-narrative existing?
3. But seriously, how reliable is the place I am getting my knowledge from?

 So my thought process is like that. If I know in my heart that my information on something is very simplistic (especially if I learned it all in the school system without checking to see if it is really true) and came from a source that may have an agenda or a bias, I need to fact-check and do more research into the thing I am interested in. As an aside, The YouTube channel Crash Course as a good program related to this about Navigating Digital Information that I will recommend. But back to the subject at hand.

When I heard of this book I was very excited to read it, but I realized that though I felt comfortable in my knowledge about the American and Nazi racial hierarchy systems, I was not so sure on my knowledge of the caste system in India. So that means for me that before I start on this one book that may give me info I need, but may not, I want to study up on this myself so that I won't need to worry about if what Wilkerson is saying is correct or not because I'll already know at least the basics. At the very start I begin with books I have, podcasts I listen to that talk about it or Wikipedia (don't cringe, I'm about to address that) to start me off--basically any resource freely-available to me that talks about the Hindu caste system. Now, I have a book called The Illustrated World's Religions: A Guide to Our Wisdom Traditions by Huston Smith, I listened to a podcast on the history of philosophy in Ancient India and I've seen the the Attenborough Gandhi movie like 6 times. This isn't enough to learn about this subject...not at all. Thankfully, I have the internet. Still, I need to know how to use it correctly for the info I need (which I do). 

So now let's get this out of the way: Wikipedia is not the devil. This may be hard for folks older than me to understand, but if you know how to use Wikipedia right than it can be a crucial resource of information or at least point you in the right direction. I think of it as a map to the destination rather than the destination itself. So when reading-up on the caste system in India, I am not actually looking for the information on the page, but at the sources where that information comes from as that is where any actual research begins. I'll try to narrow down what exactly about the caste system I am trying to learn beyond how it came about and then I can go from there. Just from a cursory glance, I know that I should look at the Manusmṛiti and parts of the Mahabharata (which I own a copy of!) for primary ancient sources (I always try to get a primary source over when I can, don't care how "complicated" or "long" it is).  I can also look at other sites beyond Wikipedia and if I know where to go (I don't).

I can also ask people who are knowledgeable on this subject or who indeed live in India (the internet is convenient in that way). Sometimes folks will point you in the right direction sometimes they will refuse to help you--you have to accept both options. I had one person who did steer me into the right direction long before I even knew I was going to be interested in this subject and recommended that I read Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand and Annihilation of Caste by B. R. Ambedkar during conversations unrelated to this subject & Wilkerson's book. 

Using all of this information, I can gather what I want to use into how much they correspond to the subject I am interested in which is currently the origin and function of the caste system in India and how it relates to the white supremacist/anti-black hierarchy of the United States of America. As I become more knowledgeable in this subject, I can add or subtract from my informal syllabus as I go along. And when I think I have learned enough on this subject, I can dive into Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents with more confidence on what is handled within it. This is, ideally, how I do any sort-of autodidacticism on a subject of interest. I say ideally because I am pretty sure that in practice, I may will not do that much prior-reading before reading Wilkerson's book. Still, this is the best way I can articulate my social sciences-oriented method of examining things that are presented before me. I can't stand being dumb and not knowing something before-hand.

My Goodreads Review of The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"'If all of their dream[sic] does not come true,' the Chicago Defender wrote at the start of the Great Migration, 'enough will come to pass to justify their actions.'"


I remember about 8 years ago, I was helping my maternal-grandfather clean the graveyard of the family church in central Virginia that my mother's family belongs to. As I was raking-up over some of the graves, I noticed that a particular section of them were of people who died during the 1910s-1920s and that I did not recognize the family names at all. My grandfather informed me that most of those families moved out of Amherst County years ago. I was curious when he said, as laconic as possible, that "they simply got tired of living here and left," and that was all he would say about it. As I finished getting those dead leaves off those dead people, the thought of those folks and families stayed with me--stays with me still. They were the beginning of the greatest population shift in modern U.S. history. Of course, this wasn't totally lost on my grandfather as his younger brothers would be among the last people to participate in that mass exodus of the American South. It would be called The Great Migration.

[A quick formatting note for this review: I am listing the songs that relate to The Great Migration--either about the folks on the move or by them. Though it has never been explored, I am surprised how much music these travelers made or had made about them. Also, whenever possible, when I name a person who left the South, I will list their origin and the year they left/joined The Great Migration in parenthesis.]

Sweet Home Chicago by Robert Johnson

That this is one of the all-time great history-books ever written is beyond doubt now. Journalist Isabel Wilkerson, had already had her name in the history-books for being the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism in 1994, she then decided to write a history of her parents’ generation which quickly became a wider history of The Great Migration. Between the end of the American Civil War and 1914, 90 percent of the African-Americans in the United States of America lived in the American South, the region that most of their African ancestors had been shipped to since August of 1619. Beginning with WWI, 6-7 million would leave the South for the Northeast, Mid-West and West. Some would go as far as Hawaii and Alaska for the sole objective of citizenship-rights. They left their old-country--their "patria" of the American South--some until the adequate enforcement of the 14th & 15th Amendment to the US Constitution, but most for good. It would radically change the whole country and every African-American family existing today are either children of these people or at least has them in their family.

My paternal-grandmother's parents were a part of the first wave to leave the South (from North Carolina), though they did not go North proper, but settled into the "gateway city" for Black Southerners of the Atlantic-Coast, Washington, D.C., where my grandmother and father were born. Washington was a gateway city because though it was not as harsh as other Southern cities, it was still a Jim Crow city and it had as many people leaving it as coming into it. The "proto-Migration" of black folks from the Deep South that started after the American Civil War usually saw Washington, D.C. as the primary destination.

The weird thing about academics when it comes to naming something....it's not always accurate. This is one of those things as the "migrants" were not actually migrants. When they left, they left for good. If they moved again it was usually to another "receiving station" of the Migration such as the Duckworth family, who left the South for Chicago and then left Chicago for the Los Angeles suburb of Compton. Anywhere, but back to the dystopian-hell that was the South. When the phenomenon was happening, there was no adequate or accurate name to describe it, but now there is.

Immigration Blues by Duke Ellington (Washington D.C.; 1923)

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees what we would roughly define these 6+ million people as are internally-displaced persons (IDPs). The UNHCR report Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement defines IDPs as "persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border." These were people who, despite having citizenship, were greatly persecuted by their home country. It was a fact celebrated by many a politician in the South and Border States and not taken seriously by those outside said states.

Dear Old Southland by the Noble Sissle Orchestra feat. Sidney Bechet (New Orleans; 1919)

This movement of IDPs from the South lasted from the beginning of the First World War and lasted until the end of the Vietnam War. It occurred in 3 waves: the first from 1915 to 1938, the second from 1941 to 1952, the last from 1953 to 1975. The book forms a narrative around three people who made the trip out of the South during the three waves. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who left Chickasaw County, Mississippi in 1937; George Swanson Starling, who left Eustis, Florida in 1945; and Cpt. Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who left Monroe, Louisiana in 1953. They were all of different economic-classes and would never meet each other and would all go to different cities at different times. They are some amazing characters.

Move On Up A Little Higher, Pts. 1 & 2 Mahalia Jackson (New Orleans; 1927)

Ida Mae Gladney is the true heroine of this book. She was as close to a real-life Alyosha Karamazov as you can get. Her life in the South was in the notoriously brutal regime of Mississippi as a sharecropper along with her husband. She was not particularly good at the job, but her husband George made up for it. The incident that saw them leave was the brutal beating of her cousin-in-law for being accused of stealing a chicken that was not stolen.

Living For The City by Stevie Wonder

The tragic George Starling. After reading this book, Starling's life inspired me to read some Franz Kafka. It was as if Kafka and Euripides were given free-rein over the man's life. He and his family lived in Florida as orange-grove pickers. He aspired to be a chemist and wanted a college degree. This was hard, given the disdain that whites have towards the idea of African-Americans getting a college education. He managed two years of college before being cut-off by his father who saw no point in a black man getting an education in the South. This led...to a series of unfortunate decisions on Starling's part. He found himself attempting unionize workers in the orange grove where he worked, which worked for a time, then certain workers, informed on him to the white management (in a style that would have made Stalin proud) and Starling found himself sneaking out of town hours before he was to be lynched in the orange-grove.

What Would I Do Without You by Ray Charles (Albany, Ga; 1948)

Robert Foster, the Epicurean. Foster was the son of a lower-middle class educator in Monroe, LA. That makes him the wealthiest and educated of the three profiled. He was driven-religiously by the fact that he did not feel he should be disrespected just because of what he looked like. He became a graduate of Morehouse College (and medical school) and married into the family of one Rufus Clement, the Headmaster of Atlanta University who infamously disposed of W.E.B. Du Bois from the university over their ideological differences. Clement and Foster were never to get along, because of the former's disdain of the others desire to leave the South. When it became apparent that any attempt to expand his practice in Monroe would be met with hostile resistance from white doctors coupled with his experience being stationed in allied-occupied Austria meant that the decision to go to Los Angeles was decided for Dr. Foster.

Hobo Blues by John Lee Hooker (Tutwiler, Miss; 1943). John Lee Hooker is an interesting case. His musical career spanned from Memphis to his time wandering out of the South into Los Angeles and his long-term home of Detroit, before spending his final years in southern California. He wrote songs about his life-long journey through the country throughout his life.

Deciding to leave the South is one thing, the leaving part was dangerous. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments had made African-Americans citizens, but the destruction of Reconstruction and Plessy v. Ferguson introduced de facto serfdom in the American South and second-class citizenship in the United States as a whole. When the first black folks left the South, it garnered little notice, but when WWI came to an end and the IDPs kept going, it set off panic in & out of the South. Southern oligarchs did not want their serfs leaving as they could be under-paid or put in debt-peonage quite easily. Whites in the North & Mid-west, many of who themselves were immigrants, did not want to compete with, go to school with or live in the same neighborhoods as African-Americans. The South would intensify the vagrancy laws of the "black codes" and arrest and imprison any African-Americans caught in train stations or trains, while cities outside of (and inside of) the former-Confederacy & border states would use restrictive covenants, mass incarceration, mob-violence and de facto racial segregation that one observes in most parts of Latin America. None of this worked because, whites underestimated the desire of African-Americans to be treated like equal citizens & African Americans were already in the country as citizens. These were free citizens, not fugitive slaves (though they were treated as such). Arrington High may have the most extraordinary story of his escape from the South, having to be broken out of an insane asylum in Mississippi (he was in there because he advocated integration publicly. Not joking) and shipped to Chicago...in a coffin. Henry Box Brown-style. For literary references to the White Southerners' view of The Great Migration, I recommend The Displaced Person by Flannery O'Connor & The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

Ida Mae and George took the train to Chicago and New York City, respectively. Foster did something different. Robert Foster decided to take the most dangerous car ride an existence. through the Southwest, detour to Mexico for tequila, and go to Los Angeles. Foster, mistakenly believed that Jim Crow stopped in Texas, and did not assume to look for any safe places for blacks in New Mexico, Arizona or Nevada. The Plessy ruling applied to all-50 states, so the Southwest and certain mid-west states had the same apartheid-laws as the South. His trip to see friends in Texas and his tequila-run in Mexico would become costly mistakes when it became clear that no motel or hotel in New Mexico or Arizona would take him. He stopped when he could, but ended up driving 20-hour stretches with little sleep nearly dying on several occasions from hallucinating while in the desert. I can't do it justice...this story is worth the price of the book alone. The success he found in Los Angeles afterwards, including some famous clientele, was well-earned. I won't tell anymore about the profilies than that, because I want this book to be read by you and not just you reading me.

Hide nor Hair by Ray Charles. If you were going to listen to one song mentioned in this review, this one is the most important one to listen to.

The fate of the people in this book was as multifaceted as you could imagine. All wanted the promise land, but not all would get it. The establishing of bases in places like South-Central, South-Side and Harlem gave African-Americans still in the South a support system, an influx of money to support families in the "Old Country," and it would spread African-American culture around the world, given that LA and NYC were the main cultural centers for spreading American culture outside the USA. Domestically, southern food, religion, music and politics would become truly national. New Orleans Jazz went to New York City; Mississippi Blues went to Chicago and became Chicago Blues. The arts and sciences would benefit as never before. Away from the caste system of the South African-Americans could innovate as any citizens did and play a role in the country's destiny. Ida Mae Gladney would cast her first vote in the swing-state of Illinois and be part of the 2% difference that re-elected Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. An IDP named Frank Marshall Davis (Arkansas City, KS; 1927) would find his efforts at being a radical artist stymied in the continental USA, during the Cold War and would move to Honolulu, Hawaii and become an accidental mentor to a young Barack Obama, trying to understand his place in the great drama of the color-line.

Tennessee by Arrested Development

I could type three reviews worth of prose on this book and subject given I have very near-history on it being related to and descended from that 6-7 million people driven-out of the South because of its wanton cruelties. The book is named for a line from Richard Wright (Roxie, Miss.; 1927) in his book about this very subject Black Boy: "I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil...

Respond to the warmth of other suns

And, perhaps, to bloom."
If one had to name all the names of these people and their kids it would drive one insane. I no longer clean graveyards and my father and his father-in-law are dead. But the memories and legacies of those who went to those other suns, grew in those other suns, and benefited from the success of those under the other suns endures. Recently we saw the death of one of these millions, Aretha Franklin (Memphis; 1944), who in January of 1972 gave a gospel performance at the New Missionary Temple Baptist Church for the "migrants" or "internally-displaced persons" living in Los Angeles. One of the songs sung was Precious Memories with James Cleveland, the son of Southerners, reminiscing back and hoping toward easier times. Times that may or may not ever exist, may or may not ever existed, but that they had to do their part to deliver on and honor.

Most of the last survivors are dying-out--the youngest are in their 50s, this book was meant to put their history in their voice and not some distant academic's, as had previously been the case. Wilkerson had planned to take only 2 years off from journalism to promote the book, yet she is still in high demand over it which is amazing in itself. I liked her methodology, but was felt that her attempt at renaming certain terminology became distracting at times, though I got used to it. That the only "complaint" to be had. She does the sort of job you'd expect from a Pulitzer-winning journalist and her notes and sources are as incredible as the main text. So great a work cannot be praised enough.

"Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not cream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts."

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My Goodreads Review of Race and the American Idea: 155 Years of Writings From The Atlantic

Race and the American Idea: 155 Years of Writings From The Atlantic by Frederick Douglass
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I reviewed this book very differently from most books, this was a "rolling review." Since this ebook is of many different articles, I reviewed the articles as I read them. I originally wanted a book form of Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case For Reparations and ended up finding that and a lot more. This is a collection of over 150 years of The Atlantic's articles on race published by its many writers and guest writers. Some of these writers would republish these articles in much more famous works like The Souls of Black Folk and Letter from the Birmingham Jail. As it is, I did my best to write as short a blurb as possible on the pieces I read from this book (at least one from every decade available).


American Civilization and The President's Proclamation (both 1862) by Ralph Waldo Emerson: These first two articles are pushing for emancipation and hailing the news of The Emancipation Proclamation. While it did have some interesting points about it, a lot of it was, sad to say, rested heavily on the Romantic and post-Romantic stereotypes of Black people as "wonderfully savage." And it suffered from "Emerson prose." Worth a look for historical purposes; 3/5.

The Story of the Contract Buyers League (April 1972) by James Alan McPherson: I jumped far ahead to read this long story in order to prepare mysrlf to re-read Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case For Reparations (which is in this book) Since this long article is a spiritual predecessor to it and many of the people in McPherson's article are re-visited in Coates'. This story is about one of the most valiant, if bittersweet, effort to push back against years of housing discrimination. This is a must to understand why Chicago is in such a deplorable state today. 4.5/5

Liberty and Equality For All and An Appeal To Congress for Impartial Suffrage (1866 and 1867) by Frederick Douglass: Both of these articles are about the need to pass what is now the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It is amazing how well these articles hold-up as a defense for the importance of universal suffrage in the United States. It is sad to ponder in the post-Shelby County v. Holder years. 5/5.

The Reconstruction of the Southern States (January 1901) by Woodrow Wilson: This article, a short "Lost Cause" history of Reconstruction, shows why former Princeton University and United States president Woodrow Wilson is so "loved and revered" at his alma mater. His basic argument is that everything was fine when southerners had control, but crazy northerners gave Black people rights and this derailed everything until finally "brave" southern whites rose-up and put the Negros in their place and now everything is in its natural place. I wish I was exaggerating. 1/5.

A Negro Speaks for His People (March 1943) by J. Saunders Redding: This article from the middle of World War II gives a surprisingly frank update on the progress of civil rights for African-Americans and the efforts that Black people North and South were doing and the resistance that they were encountering. This article has some very timely quotes: "They mean what a Negro United Mine Workers official in West Virginia told me in 1940: 'Let me tell you, buddy. Waking up is a damn sight more harder than going to sleep, but we'll stay woke up longer.'" [Bold emphasis mine.] 4.5/5

The Angry South (April 1956) by Ralph McGill: Ahh yes. I was waiting for this type of article, Southern White Liberal admits that racism is wrong, but that the South has to be gradually and sensitively changed. This guy knows that there is a problem, but he certainly does not want to be the guy who proposes the solution. This was written in response to the South's opposition to school integration and is like a white response to the last article I read. 3/5.

Letter from the Birmingham Jail (April 1963) by Martin Luther King Jr.: When I finally review this, I will link to it here.

W.E.B. Du Bois (November 1965) by Ralph McGill: Once again, our liberal Southern apologist is back and this time he is recounting his interview with Dr. Du Bois 6 months before his death in 1963. It is mainly about his leaving the NAACP and becoming a socialist, as well as a lengthy final thought on Booker T. Washington, his intellectual rival. While McGill's apologist sentiment for Washington and obsession with
Du Bois' Marxism is annoying, I found his recounting of Du Bois' own feelings, especially on Booker T. Washington, to be amazing (Du Bois gives one of the most amazing breakdowns of why Washington's accomidationalism was so damning). I will give McGill credit for this statement as well: "Six months later in faraway Ghana W. E. B. DuBois died. It was August 28, 1963, the eve of the march on Washington, the largest demonstration for civil rights ever held. One could not help experiencing a feeling of destiny linking both events. The man who for many years had spoken with the loudest and most articulate voice was now silent while his objectives were being realized." 4/5.

Where Ghetto Schools Fail (October 1967) by Jonathan Kozol: This was the second of a two-part series from Kozol on his year teaching in a mostly Black elementary school in Boston. This article reads like an intro to Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong and much of what would later be described in Loewen's book was on active display here to particularly dis-heartening effect. This article shows why integration is just as needed in New England as it is in the South. 5/5.

Indivisible Man (December 1970) by Ralph Ellison and James Alan McPherson: This article was another personal treat for me to read as it is a snapshot of Ralph Ellison and his reaction to the Black Power movement. This article also has Ellison compare his experiences as a writer pre- and post-Invisible Man. It uses not only notes and quotes from McPherson's live interviews with Ellison, but also their long letter correspondences. It was interesting to see how young Black social consciousness was going counter to Ellison's more integrationist tone. Ellison's peer James Baldwin was having similar trouble around this time. I liked Ellison's insight on the centrality of African-Americans to American culture and history. I wish he wasn't so arrogant when it came to both the work of young Black writers at that time and his own debt that he owed to older Black writers that proceeded him. 5/5.

A Question of Fairness (February 1987) by Juan Williams: This article details the rise of one Clarence Thomas, the archtype of self-hating Black American conservatives during the 1990s when I was growing up. This article details his life and career up to the beginning of his second term as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and his attempts to cripple it. I did not learn anything new from this, but nice to know how long he has been this way. 2.8/5.

Race (May 1991) by Thomas Byrne Edsall & Mary D. Edsall: This study from 1991 presents a then-landmark, but now confirmed fact that racial identity plays a disproportionate impact in American political life and the growing polarization of American politics since 1968 can be traced to the impact of the Civil Rights Movement. I felt that though certain points and research in this report were a bit dated, it non-the-less laid bare how much both parties had begun to shape their policies to appeal to white working class voters exclusively. 3.5/5 .

The New Intellectuals (March 1995) by Robert S. Boynton: This interesting article is an overview of the Black "public intellectuals" that emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth-century. These are people like Cornel West, bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, Stanley Crouch, Juan Williams, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and many more. This book compares the emergence of this group to the Jewish-American intellectuals who emerged in the pre-WWII era and the African-American intellectuals (e.g. Ralph Ellison & James Baldwin) who came to prominence post-WWII. This was a very comprehensive introduction and comparison of this group in 1995 and I would not mind seeing a follow-up to it how this intellectual "class" has faired twenty one years later. 5/5.

A Just Cause (February 2000) by Jack Beatty: This is a book review of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks by Randall Robinson. The review details Robinson's successful campaign to get Harvard University to divest from Apartheid South Africa and how his book wants to use similar methods to pursue restitution for African-Americans. This is the first article in this anthology to address this topic head-on, but a much more comprehensive one awaits. 4/5.

Segregation Now... (May 2014) by Nikole Hannah-Jones: This long-form article is a devastatingly powerful look at the re-segregation of the American public school system. Mrs. Hannah-Jones has written on this topic for most of her career and this article is one of her crowning achievements. It shows how the stalwart resistance by white-Americans as a whole (no matter what ideology) doomed Brown vs Board of Education from the word go. The Federal government, through the courts, did all it could to implement "Brown," culminating in 1988 being the most integrated year in U.S. public school life. But by then, the reaction against "Brown" was already in full effect and now American schools are nearly as segregated in 2016 as they were in 1956. This hit home (or should I say school) with me because most of my grade school life was spent in these re-segregated schools (which means my mom and her siblings will be the only generation in my family to go to integrated schools for their entire grade school career). According to Hannah-Jones, Jefferson County, Kentucky remains the only school district in the country to voluntarily continue integration. This, of course, has had a devastating impact on the state of education for my generation and the generations after us. Beyond this work, Mrs. Hannah-Jones has also won a Peabody Award for a radio broadcast examining this phenomenon in the St. Louis area after the death of Mike Brown and an article in the New York Times Magazine detailing her struggle in choosing a primary school for her daughter in New York City (2nd most segregated school system in the country). 5/5.

Fear of a Black President & The Emancipation of Barack Obama (September 2012/March 2013) by Ta-Nehisi Coates: What a timely reflection of days gone by. These two articles by Ta-Nehisi Coates begins his current intellectual-run that he is still going in. These two articles look at the end of Barack Obama's first term and the beginning of his second. It seems, now, a lifetime ago, but it was real. Coates catalogues the particular struggles that President Obama had to endure and the tightrope that he walked as the luster of being the first Black president quickly gave way to the reality of that distinction in a country built on white supremacy. These articles display the expert journalistic efficiency that made me first come to admire Mr. Coates. Despite his protest of the very concept, the second article shows Coates seeming to be cautiously hopeful of the second Obama term. Given that he was to follow these articles up with the "magnum opus" of his journalistic work, these two articles serve as a good warm-up. This also marked when I first heard of the man. Both 4/5. Update: Here is Coates' interview with Obama himself which I will throw in for good measure: My President Was Black

The Case for Reparations & The Black Family In The Age of Mass Incarceration (June 2014/October 2015) by Ta-Nehisi Coates: These two journal articles are widely regarded as Ta-Nehisi Coates' finest work of journalistic non-fiction. The former is regarded as his best work for the Atlantic and its sequel is an amazing follow-up/supplement that picks-up where TCFR left off and fills in gaps of small things simply touched on in the former. TCFR starts off as an update of James Alan McPherson's story for The Atlantic: The Story of the Contract Buyers League. It then goes into its thesis that white supremacy in the United States is so prevalent that African-Americans do not need to go back to slavery or the last 50 years to seek restitution for crimes perpetrated by the state.

"The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery...But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals."

This quote is just one small sample from what is one of the greatest journal articles I have ever read and what made me a fan of the brother and fellow Maryland native. The follow-up is sort of a stealth response to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, but in the context of the career of policy-maker Daniel Patrick Moyniham who became the spearhead of Black Mass-incarceration and worked with multiple Presidents from LBJ and Nixon to Clinton to give us this problem with mass incarceration we have today. It also shows how the criminal justice systems in the American North and South dealt with African-Americans using the courts and prisons (and to the surprise of few who have done the homework, the North already had proto-mass incarceration while the South relied on terrorism). Both 5/5


I stumbled on this ebook anthology by accident, but this is one of those good accidents that I do not have very often. I have only reviewed a sample of all the articles actually in this ebook. If you use an e-reader of any kind, please pick this book up and soak-up all the knowledge and history within it.

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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!"

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