Suppose for a moment that Northern labor had stopped the bargain of 1876 and maintained the power of the labor vote in the South and suppose that the Negro with new and dawning consciousness of the demands of labor as differentiated from the demands of capitalists, had used his vote more specifically for the benefit of white labor, South and North?”
Thus labor went into the great war of 1877 against Northern capitalists unsupported by the black man, and the black man went his way in the South to strengthen and consolidate his power, unsupported by Northern labor. It lost interest and vital touch with Southern labor and acted as though the millions of laborers in the South did not exist. “As negroes moved from unionism toward political action, white labor in the North not only moved in the opposite direction from political action to union organization, but also evolved the American Blindspot for the Negro and his problems. This seems like a good time to share my semi-regular reminder that the final chapter of Du Bois’ Black Recontruction should be taught in every American history class. In setting the record straight Du Bois produced what co-editor Eric Foner has called an “indispensable book,” a magisterial work of detached scholarship that is also imbued with passionate outrage. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected.” “The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself,” Du Bois argued, “has been almost barred from court. One of the towering African American thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois brought all his intellectual powers to bear on the nation’s post-Civil War era of political reorganization, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and ultimately yielded to the consolidation of the unjust social order of Jim Crow.īlack Reconstruction is a pioneering work of revisionist scholarship that, in the wake of the censorship of Du Bois’s characterization of Reconstruction by the Encyclopedia Britannica, was written to debunk influential historians whose racist ideas and emphases had disfigured the historical record. Du Bois’s now classic Black Reconstruction in America offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction - and of U.S.
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