Black Reconstruction in America

Introduction

Du Bois published the book in 1935, subtitled “An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880”. It opens with chapters on “The Black Worker”, “The White Worker” and “The Planter”, and reads the flight of enslaved people to the Union lines as a “general strike” that helped decide the war. Reconstruction appears as an experiment in democracy – public schools, new state constitutions, Black office-holders – that was ended by an alliance of former planters and northern capital. White workers, Du Bois argues, accepted low wages because they received “a sort of public and psychological wage” of whiteness, a phrase David Roediger took up in The Wages of Whiteness (1991). The last chapter, “The Propaganda of History”, attacks the historians of the Dunning School, who had portrayed Reconstruction as an era of corruption. Most of the profession ignored the book at first; later research, such as Eric Foner’s Reconstruction (1988), took up many of its arguments.

Connections

Builds on

• Capital1867 · Karl Marx
• The Souls of Black Folk1903 · W. E. B. Du Bois

More works by W. E. B. Du Bois

• 1899The Philadelphia Negro
• 1903The Souls of Black Folk