NOT WELCOME IN DESANTIS FLORIDA
Nine decades later, W.E.B. Du Bois’s work faces familiar criticisms
Perspective by Martha S. JonesMartha S. Jones is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All.”
January 7, 2022
W. E. B. Du Bois (R) and Paul Robeson (L)
When he published “Black Reconstruction” in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois challenged Americans to see the years following the Civil War as a counterpoint to the Jim Crow era in the 20th century. During Reconstruction, the nation took steps to ensure that Black Americans, many of them formerly enslaved, could exercise rights once available to White Americans only. As Black men voted and Black Americans remade Southern society, opposition surged. Reconstruction was a brief experiment, lasting less than 15 years. Still, Du Bois explained how formerly enslaved people were pivotal actors during that first attempt to build an interracial democracy. Suppression of those efforts, he argued, foretold the lynchings, disenfranchisement and segregation that troubled the Jim Crow South.
“Black Reconstruction,” published against a backdrop of violence and segregation, met with a vitriolic reception. White writers leveled sharp-tongued critiques. Black journalists assessed the work favorably but with reservations. Despite the early criticism, over time “Black Reconstruction” came to be recognized as a towering analysis of American culture and an important work of history. Nonetheless, the book’s contribution to the understanding of American racism is, nearly 90 years after its publication, still subject to stale objections that echo those heard when it first hit bookstore shelves.
The 2021 release of the Library of America’s edition of “Black Reconstruction,” edited by Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates Jr., confirms the book’s place in the pantheon of great works of enduring influence. Historians today return to Du Bois’s study to understand how Reconstruction, its accomplishments and its disappointments grew out of the legacies of slavery and the divisions of the Civil War. Du Bois underscored the political agency of Black Americans, noting how, among other examples, enslaved people changed the course of the Civil War by stopping work on Southern plantations in what he called a “general strike.” Du Bois challenged historians to stop using history to justify the suppression of Black voting rights. The nation, he urged, needed historians “who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race.”
Today, “Black Reconstruction” is a must-read for scholars in the fields of history, literature, education, political theory, law and conflict studies. But it wasn’t always so. Immediately after its publication, the book was mostly disdained or simply ignored. In those years, Columbia University professor William Dunning and his followers dominated thinking on Reconstruction. This conservative school of thought turned out shoddy studies that labeled the Reconstruction era a “tragedy” that threatened white supremacy by elevating Black Americans to full citizenship. Echoing Dunning School sentiments, University of Chicago historian Avery Craven issued an unvarnished denouncement of Du Bois’s book in January 1936. Craven charged that Du Bois wrote “Black Reconstruction” out of a festering in his soul rather than from his graduate training at the University of Berlin and at Harvard, and his authorship of more than a dozen previous books. “It is, in large part,” Craven mocked, “only the expression of a Negro’s bitterness against the injustice of slavery and racial prejudice.”
Craven characterized “Black Reconstruction” as “history re-written,” not to laud the book’s contribution to the historiographic debates of the time but to malign it as an illegitimate analysis. Du Bois, he asserted, cherry-picked his evidence such that “source materials so essential to any rewriting of history have been completely ignored.” If Du Bois did not include the range of materials Craven expected, it was because, as a more sympathetic reviewer pointed out, he “had not the time, money, and opportunity requisite to permit him to go back to the original sources in all cases.” Du Bois himself openly conceded that he was a Black historian subjected to Jim Crow restrictions in the academy and in the archives.
When Du Bois did plumb the documentary record, he turned to evidence that Craven deemed out of bounds: “abolition propaganda and the biased statements of partisan politicians.” The result, Craven contended, was a “half-baked Marxian interpretation.” He concluded that the book presented a “badly distorted picture” and that Du Bois had overreached
Black journalists were among the first to closely read “Black Reconstruction.” Henry Lee Moon, writing for Harlem’s Amsterdam News, explained that Du Bois showed how “there could be no serious study and consideration of the period immediately following the civil war which did not view the Negro as being a human being endowed with the same weaknesses and strengths that characterize other races.” But Moon broke with the near-consensus among Black reviewers who praised Du Bois’s scholarship and brilliant style. He found Du Bois’s evidence lacking in some places and warned presciently that “Black Reconstruction” should expect negative reviews from readers on the right and the left.
What Moon could not have imagined is that, today, much of the early criticism has resurfaced. A case in point is Helen Andrews’s recent review of the Library of America’s reissue of “Black Reconstruction.” At times, Andrews appears to borrow directly from Craven, mocking Du Bois, as she writes in the American Conservative, for his “bold attempt to apply a Marxist framework to the Civil War period.” Andrews virtually parrots Craven when she criticizes the book’s “limited sources” and lack of “original archival research,” which Du Bois himself lamented. A senior editor at the American Conservative, Andrews endorses the Dunning School view, as Craven did, when she concludes that “Reconstruction was bad, objectively bad.”
Between Craven in 1936 and Andrews in 2021, historians have produced a small library’s worth of works on Reconstruction. Many build upon Du Bois’s thinking, while some others depart from it. But among these studies, most rare is the historian who fails to reach back to Du Bois’s ideas to explain the genesis of their interpretation. With the rise of the modern civil rights movement, Reconstruction received serious reconsideration, and “Black Reconstruction” became a staple in scholarly debates. Du Bois’s work maintains an unshakable relevance to understanding what some have termed the second American revolution, a brief period when the nation worked toward a multiracial democracy.
Today, we read “Black Reconstruction” to further our thinking about racism and inequality in America, and to heed the book’s call to assess clear-eyed where this country has been and where it still might go.
Black Reconstruction
An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 & Other Writings
By W.E.B. Du Bois
Library of America. 1,085 pp. $45
W. E. B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963
The Souls of Black Folk; Essays and Sketches
Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903.
W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a seminal work in African American literature and an American classic. In this work Du Bois proposes that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." His concepts of life behind the veil of race and the resulting "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," have become touchstones for thinking about race in America. In addition to these enduring concepts, Souls offers an assessment of the progress of the race, the obstacles to that progress, and the possibilities for future progress as the nation entered the twentieth century.
Du Bois examines the years immediately following the Civil War and, in particular, the Freedmen's Bureau's role in Reconstruction. The Bureau's failures were due not only to southern opposition and "national neglect," but also to mismanagement and courts that were biased "in favor of black litigants." The Bureau did have successes as well, and its most important contribution to progress was the founding of African American schools. Since the end of Reconstruction in 1876, Du Bois claims that the most significant event in African American history has been the rise of the educator, Booker T. Washington, to the role of spokesman for the race. Du Bois argues that Washington's approach to race relations is counterproductive to the long-term progress of the race. Washington's acceptance of segregation and his emphasis on material progress represent an "old attitude of adjustment and submission." Du Bois asserts that this policy has damaged African Americans by contributing to the loss of the vote, the loss of civil status, and the loss of aid for institutions of higher education. Du Bois insists that "the right to vote," "civic equality," and "the education of youth according to ability" are essential for African American progress.
Du Bois relates his experiences as a schoolteacher in rural Tennessee, and then he turns his attention to a critique of American materialism in the rising city of Atlanta where the single-minded attention to gaining wealth threatens to replace all other considerations. In terms of education, African Americans should not be taught merely to earn money. Rather, Du Bois argues there should be a balance between the "standards of lower training" and the "standards of human culture and lofty ideals of life." In effect, the African American college should train the "Talented Tenth" who can in turn contribute to lower education and also act as liaisons in improving race relations.
Du Bois returns to an examination of rural African American life with a presentation of Dougherty County, Georgia as representative of life in the southern Black Belt. He presents the history and current conditions of the county. Cotton is still the life-blood of the Black Belt economy, and few African Americans are enjoying any economic success. Du Bois describes the legal system and tenant farming system as only slightly removed from slavery. He also examines African American religion from its origins in African society, through its development in slavery, to the formation of the Baptist and Methodist churches. He argues that "the study of Negro religion is not only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but no uninteresting part of American history." He goes on to examine the impact of slavery on morality.
In the last chapters of his book, Du Bois concentrates on how racial prejudice impacts individuals. He mourns the loss of his baby son, but he wonders if his son is not better off dead than growing up in a world dominated by the color-line. Du Bois relates the story of Alexander Crummel, who struggled against prejudice in his attempts to become an Episcopal priest. In "Of the Coming of John," Du Bois presents the story of a young black man who attains an education. John's new knowledge, however, places him at odds with a southern community, and he is destroyed by racism. Finally, Du Bois concludes his book with an essay on African American spirituals. These songs have developed from their African origins into powerful expressions of the sorrow, pain, and exile that characterize the African American experience. For Du Bois, these songs exist "not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas."
Andrew Leiter
Document menu
Return to The Church in the Southern Black Community Home Page
Return to Documenting the American South Home PageW. E. B. Du Bois questions the way that Reconstruction was studied and taught in an excerpt from his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America.
LAST UPDATED: May 12, 2020
In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois published an influential book titled Black Reconstruction in America. This excerpt, from a chapter titled “The Propaganda of History,” questions the ways in which Reconstruction was being studied and taught at the time.
How the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy.
What are American children taught today about Reconstruction? . . . [A]n American youth attending college today would learn from current textbooks of history that the Constitution recognized slavery; that the chance of getting rid of slavery by peaceful methods was ruined by the Abolitionists; that after the period of Andrew Jackson, the two sections of the United States “had become fully conscious of their conflicting interests. Two irreconcilable forms of civilization . . . .” He would read that Harriet Beecher Stowe brought on the Civil War; that the assault on Charles Sumner was due to his “coarse invective” against a South Carolina Senator; and that Negroes were the only people to achieve emancipation with no effort on their part. That Reconstruction was a disgraceful attempt to subject white people to ignorant Negro rule . . .
In other words, he would in all probability complete his education without any idea of the part which the black race has played in America; of the tremendous moral problem of abolition; of the cause and meaning of the Civil War and the relation which Reconstruction had to democratic government and the labor movement today . . .
War and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds. It is the duty of humanity to heal them. It was therefore soon conceived as neither wise nor patriotic to speak of all the causes of strife and the terrible results to which national differences in the United States had led. And so, first of all, we minimized the slavery controversy which convulsed the nation from the Missouri Compromise down to the Civil War. On top of that, we passed by Reconstruction with a phrase of regret or disgust.
But are these reasons of courtesy and philanthropy sufficient for denying Truth? If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with the accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.
If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.
It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is “lies agreed upon”; and to point out the danger in such misinformation. It is indeed extremely doubtful if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action. Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?
How to Cite This Reading
Facing History and Ourselves, "W. E. B. Du Bois Reflects on the Purpose of History," last updated May 12, 2020.
This reading contains text not authored by Facing History and Ourselves. See footnotes for source information.
No comments:
Post a Comment